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WILD LIFE NEAE HOME 




"The feast is finished and the games are on." 



TKMIb Xlfe Wear 
IDome 

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NEW YORK 

Zhc Centura Co. 

1901 



THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

Two Coptts Received 

OCT. 4 1901 

COPYRtGHT ENTRY 

CLASS (X XXc No 
COPY B. 



Copyright, 1901, by 
The Century Co. 

Copyright, 1897, by The J. B. Lippincott Co. 

Copyright, 1897, by Perry Mason & Co. 

Copyright, 1898, by Frank Leslie's Publishing House. 



Published October, 1901. 



QLol 



TO 
MY WIFE 



CONTENTS 



In Persimmon-time . 

Birds' Winter Beds 

Some Snug Winter Beds 

A Bird of the Dark 

The Pine-tree Swift 

In the October Moon 

Feathered Neighbors . 

"Mus'rattin' " . 

A Study in Bird Morals 

Babbit Boads . 

Brick-top .... 

Second Crops 

Wood-pussies 

From Kiver-ooze to Tree-top 

A Buzzards' Banquet 

Up Herring Kun 



1 

31 

47 

65 

79 

95 

111 

169 

185 

207 

233 

247 

277 

295 

321 

341 



I wish to thank the editors of ' ' Lippincott's Magazine, ' ' ' ' Frank 
Leslie's Popular Monthly," "Zion's Herald," and the "Youth's 
Companion " for allowing me to reprint here the chapters of 
"Wild Life Near Home" that first appeared in their pages. 

Dallas Lore Sharp 



[xi] 



ILLUSTKATKWS 

PAGE 

The feast is finished and the games are on Frontispiece 
Ripe and rimy with November's frosts ... 5 
Swinging from the limbs by their long prehen- 
sile tails 7 

Under such conditions he looks quite like a fero- 
cious beast 10 

Filing through the corn-stubs 13 

Here on the fence we waited 16 

He had stopped for a meal on his way out . . 20 

Playing possum 22 

She was standing off a dog 26 

The cheerful little goldfinches, that bend the 

dried ragweeds 37 

There she stood in the snow with head high, lis- 
tening anxiously 45 

And — dreamed 46 

I shivered as the icy flakes fell thicker and faster 52 

The meadow-mouse 55 

It was Whitefoot 60 

From his leafless height he looks down into the 

Hollow 63 

It caught at the insects in the air . . . .71 

[xiii] 



PAGE 

Unlike any bird of the light . . . . . 77 

They peek around the tree-trunks . . . .83 

The sparrow-hawk searching the fences for them 88 

In October they are building their winter lodges 103 

The glimpse of Reynard in the moonlight . . 106 

They probe the lawns most diligently for worms . 117 

Even he loves a listener 118 

She flew across the pasture 121 

Putting things to rights in his house . . . 122 

A very ordinary New England " corner " . . 124 

They are the first to return in the spring . . 127 

Where the dams are hawking for flies . . . 130 

They cut across the rainbow 135 

The barn-swallows fetch the summer . . . 137 

From the barn to the orchard 138 

Across the road, in an apple-tree, built a pair of 
redstarts 140 

Gathered half the gray hairs of a dandelion into 
her beak 143 

In the tree next to the chebec's was a brood of 
robins. The crude nest was wedged carelessly 
into the lowest fork of the tree, so that the cats 
and roving boys could help themselves without 
trouble . 145 

I soon spied him on the wires of a telegraph-pole 148 

He will come if May comes 151 

Within a few feet of me dropped the lonely fright- 
ened quail 152 

On they go to a fence-stake . . . . . 154 

[xiv] 



PAGE 

It was a love-song 156 

But the pair kept on together, chatting brightly 161 

In a dead yellow birch 163 

So close I can look directly into it . . . . 164 

Uncle Jethro limbered his stiffened knees and 
went chuckling down the bank .... 170 

The big moon was rising over the meadows . . 173 

Section of muskrat's house 174 

The snow has drifted over their house till only a 
tiny mound appears 177 

They rubbed noses 179 

Two little brown creatures washing calamus . 180 

She melted away among the dark pines like a 

shadow 186 

She called me every wicked thing that she could 

think of 189 

It was one of those cathedral-like clumps . . 191 

They were watching me 192 

A triumph of love and duty over fear . . . 199 

He wants to know where I am and what I am about 203 

In the agony of death 205 

Calamity is hot on his track 212 

Bunny, meantime, is watching just inside the 
next brier-patch 215 

The squat is a cold place 217 

The limp, lifeless one hanging over the neck of 
that fox 220 

His drop is swift and certain 225 

Seven young ones in the nest 231 

[XV] 



PAGE 

The land of the mushroom 239 

Witch-hazel 244 

I knew it suited exactly 252 

With tail up, head cocked, very much amazed, 
and commenting vociferously .... 254 

In a solemn row upon the wire fence . . . 257 

Young flying-squirrels 258 

The sentinel crows are posted .... 260 

She turned and fixed her big black eyes hard on 
me 265 

Wrapped up like little Eskimos .... 266 

It is no longer a sorry forest of battered, sunken 

stumps 269 

Even the finger-board is a living pillar of ivy . 272 
A family of seven young skunks .... 284 

The family followed 289 

" Spring! spring! spring!" . ... . . 300 

A wretched little puddle 303 

He was trying to swallow something . . . 307 

In a state of soured silence 322 

Ugliness incarnate 325 

Sailing over the pines 328 

A banquet this sans toasts and cheer . . . 333 
Floating without effort among the clouds . . 337 
From unknown regions of the ocean . . . 345 
A crooked, fretful little stream .... 346 
Swimming, jumping, flopping, climbing, up he 

comes ! 349 

Here again hungry enemies await them . . 355 

[xvi] 



IN PERSIMMON-TIME 




WILD LIFE ]STEAE HOME 



IN PEKSIMMON-TIME 



THE season of ripe persimmons in the pine- 
barren region of New Jersey falls during 
the days of frosty mornings, of wind-strewn 
leaves and dropping nuts. Melancholy days 
these may be in other States, but never such 
here. The robin and the wren — I am not sure 
about all of the wrens— are flown, just as the 
poet says ; but the jay and the crow are by no 
means the only birds that remain. Bob White 
calls from the swales and " cut-offs" ; the cardi- 
nal sounds his clear, brilliant whistle in the 
thickets ; and the meadow-lark, scaling across 

[3] 



the pastures, flirts his tail from the fence -stake 
and shouts, Can you see-e me ? These are some 
of the dominant notes that still ring through 
the woods and over the fields. Nor has every 
fleck of color gone from the face of the out-of- 
doors. She is not yet a cold, white body 
wrapped in her winding-sheet. The flush of 
life still lingers in the stag-horn sumac, where 
it will burn brighter and warmer as the short- 
ening days darken and deaden • and there is 
more than a spark — it is a steady glow — on the 
hillsides, where the cedar, pine, and holly 
stand, that will live and cheer us throughout 
the winter. What the soil has lost of life and 
vigor the winds have gained ; and if the birds 
are fewer now, there is a stirring of other ani- 
mal life in the open woods and wilder places that 
was quite lost in the bustle of summer. 

And yet ! it is a bare world, in spite of the 
snap and crispness and the signs of harvest every- 
where 5 a wider, silenter, sadder world, though I 
cannot own a less beautiful world, than in sum- 
mer. The corn is cut, the great yellow shocks 
standing over the level fields like weather- 
beaten tepees in deserted Indian villages j frosts 

[4] 



have mown the grass and stripped the trees, so 
that, from a bluff along the creek, the glistening 
Cohansev can be traced down miles of its course, 
and through the parted curtains, wide vistas of 
meadow and farm that were entirely hidden by 
the green foliage lie open like a map. 

This is persimmon-time. Since most of the 
leaves have fallen, there is no trouble in finding 
the persimmon-trees. They are sprinkled about 
the woods, along the fences and highways, as 




'" Ripe and rimy with November's frosts." 

naked as the other trees, but conspicuous among 
them all because of their round, dark-red fruit. 
What a season of fruit ours is ! Opening down 
in the grass with the wild strawberries of May, 
and continuing without break or stint, to close 
high in the trees with the persimmon, ripe and 
rimy with November's frosts ! The persimmon 

[5] 



is the last of the fruits. Long before November 
the apples are gathered— even the " grindstones " 
are buried by this time ; the berries, too, have 
disappeared, except for such seedy, juiceless 
things as hang to the cedar, the dogwood, and 
greenbrier ; and the birds have finished the scat- 
tered, hidden clusters of racy chicken-grapes. 
The persimmons still hold on ; but these are not 
for long, unless you keep guard over the trees, 
for they are marked : the possums have counted 
every persimmon. 

You will often wonder why you find so few 
persimmons upon the ground after a windy, 
frosty night. Had you happened under the 
trees just before daybreak, you would have seen 
a possum climbing about in the highest branches, 
where the frost had most keenly nipped the fruit. 
You would probably have seen two or three up 
the trees, if persimmons were scarce and possums 
plentiful in the neighborhood, swinging from 
the limbs by their long prehensile tails, and 
reaching out to the ends of the twigs to gather 
in the soft, sugary globes. Should the wind be 
high and the fruit dead ripe, you need not look 
into the trees for the marauders ; they will be 

[6] 



-<■> «) 



ikiiLJb 




upon the ground, nosing out the lumps as they 
fall. A possum never does anything for him- 
self that he can let the gods do for him. 

Your tree is perhaps near the road and an old 
rail-pile. Then you may expect to find your per- 
simmons rolled up in possum fat among the rails ; 
for here the thieves are sure to camp through- 
out the persimmon season, as the berry-pickers 
camp in the pines during huckleberry-time. 

Possums and persimmons come together, and 
Uncle Jethro pronounces them "bofe good fruit." 
He is quite right. The old darky is not alone in 
his love of possums. To my thinking, he shows 
a nice taste in preferring November possum to 
chicken. 

It is a common thing, in passing through 
Mount Zion or Springtown in the winter, to see 
what, at first glance, looks like a six- weeks' pig 
hanging from an up -stairs window, but which, 

[■] 



'• Swinging from the 
limbs by their long 
prehensile tails." 



on inspection, proves to be a possum, scalded, 
scraped, and cleaned for roasting, suspended 
there, out of the reach of dogs and covetous 
neighbors, for the extra flavor of a freezing. 
Now stuff it and roast it, and I will swap my 
Thanksgiving turkey for it as quickly as will 
Uncle Jethro himself. 

Though the possum is toothsome, he is such 
a tame, lumbering dolt that few real sportsmen 
care for the sorry joy of killing him. Innumer- 
able stories have been told of the excitement of 
possum -hunting ; but after many winters, well 
sprinkled with moonlight tramps and possums, 
I can liken the sport to nothing more thrilling 
than a straw-ride or a quilting-party. 

There is the exhilarating tramp through the 
keen, still night, and if possum-hunting will take 
one out to the woods for such tramps, then it 
is quite worth while. 

No one could hunt possums except at night. 
It would be unendurably dull by daylight. The 
moon and the dark lend a wonderful largeness 
to the woods, transforming the familiar day- 
scenes into strange, wild regions through which 
it is an adventure merely to walk. There is 

[8] 



magic in darkness. However dead by day, the 
fields and woods are fully alive at night. We 
stop at the creaking of the bare boughs over- 
head as if some watchful creature were about to 
spring upon us ; every stump and bush is an 
animal that we have startled into sudden fixed- 
ness ; and out of every shadow we expect a 
live thing to rise up and withstand us. The 
hoot of the owl, the bark of the fox, the whinny 
of the coon, send shivers of excitement over us. 
We jump at a mouse in the leaves near by. 

Helped out by the spell of moonlight and 
the collusion of a ready fancy, it is possible to 
have a genuine adventure by seizing a logy, 
grinning possum by the tail and dragging him 
out of a stump. Under such conditions he 
looks quite like a ferocious beast, grunting and 
hissing with wide-open mouth ; and you may 
feel just a thrill of the real savage's joy as you 
sling him over your shoulder. 

But never go after possums alone, nor with a 
white man. If you must go, then go with Uncle 
Jethro and Calamity. I remember particularly 
one night's hunt with Uncle Jethro. I had come 
upon him in the evening out on the kitchen steps 

[9] 




" Under such conditions he looks quite like a ferocious beast. 



watching the rim of the rising moon across the 
dark, stubby corn-field. It was November, and 
the silver light was spreading a plate of frost over 
the field and its long, silent rows of corn-shocks. 

AVhen Uncle Jethro studied the clouds or the 
moon in this way, it meant a trip to the mea- 
dows or the swamp ; it was a sure sign that geese 
had gone over, that the possums and coons were 
running. 

I knew to-night — for I could smell the per- 
fume of the ripe persimmons on the air— that 
down by the creek, among the leafless tops of 
the persinmion- trees, Uncle Jethro saw a possum. 

"Is it Br'er Possum or Br'er Coon, Uncle 
Jethro % " I asked, slyly, just as if I did not know. 

"Boosh! boosh!" sputtered the old darky, 
terribly scared by my sudden appearance. 
"Wat yo' 'xplodin' my cogitations lak dat fo"? 
Wat I know 'bout any possum? Possum, boy? 
Possum! Wat yo' mean?" 

"Don't you sniff the 'simmons, Uncle Jethf " 

Instinctively he threw his nose into the air. 

"G' 'way, boy ; g' 'way funi yhere ! I ain't seen 
no possum. I 's thinkin' 'bout dat las' canip- 
meetin' in de pines " ; and he began to hum : 

[ii] 



" Lawd, I wunda, who kilt John Henry, 
In de la-ane, in de lane." 

Half an hour later we were filing through 
the corn-stubs toward the creek. Uncle Jethro 
carried his long musket under his arm ; I had a 
stout hickory stick and a meal-sack ; while ahead 
of us, like a sailor on shore, rolled Calamity, the 
old possum-dog. 

If in June come perfect days, then perfect 
nights come in November. There is one thing, 
at least, as rare as a June day, and that is a clear, 
keen November night, enameled with frost and 
set with the hunter's moon. 

Uncle Jethro was not thinking of last summer's 

camp -meeting now ; but still he crooned softly a 

camp-meeting melody : 

" Sheep an' de goats a- 
Gwine to de pastcha, 
Sheep tell de goats, ' Ain't yo' 
Walkaleetlefasta?' 

" Lawd, I wunda, who kilt John Henry, 
In de la-ane, in de lane. 

" Coon he up a gum-tree, 
Possum in de holla; 
Coon he roll hi'self in ha'r, 
Possum roll in talla. 

"Lawd, I wunda — " 
[12] 



until we began to skirt Cubby Hollow, when he 
suddenly brought himself up with a snap. 

It was Calamity "talkin' in one of her tongues." 
The short, sharp bark came down from the fence 
at the brow of the hill. Uncle Jethro listened. 




Filing through the corn-stubs." 



"Jis squirrel-talk, dat. She '11 talk possum 
by-um-bit, she will. Ain't no possum-dog in des 
diggin's kin talk possum wid C'lamity. An' 
w'en she talk possum, ol' man possum gotter 
listen. Sell C'lamity ? Dat dog can't be bought, 
she can't." 

[13] 



As we came under the persimmon-trees at the 
foot of Lupton's Pond, the moon was high enough 
to show us that no possum had been here yet, 
for there was abundance of the luscious, frost- 
nipped fruit upon the ground. In the bare trees 
the persimmons hung like silver beads. We 
stopped to gather a few, when Calamity woke 
the woods with her cry. 

"Dar he is ! Claim ty done got ol 7 man pos- 
sum now ! Down by de bend! Dat 7 s possum- 
talk, big talk, fat talk ! " And we hurried after 
the dog. 

We had gone half a mile, and Uncle Jethro 
had picked himself up at least three times, when 
I protested. 

"Uncle Jeth ! " I cried, "that 7 s an awfully 
long-legged possum. He '11 run all his fat off 
before we catch him.' 7 

"Dat 's so, boy, shu' 'nough ! W 7 at dat ol 7 
fool dog tree a long-legged possum fo 7 , nohow? 
Yer, Clamity, 7 lamity, yer, yer ! ' 7 he yelled, as 
the hound doubled and began to track the rabbit 
back toward us. 

We were thoroughly cooled before Calamity 
appeared. She was boxed on the ear and sent 

[14] 



off again with the command to talk possum next 
time or be shot. 

She was soon talking again. This time it 
must be possum- talk. There could be no mis- 
take about that long, steady, jjlacid howl. The 
dog must be under a tree or beside a stump wait- 
ing for us. As Uncle Jethro heard the cry he 
chuckled, and a new moon broke through his 
dusky countenance. 

"Yhear dat? Bat J s possum-talk. C'lamity 
done meet up wid de oF man dis time, shu'." 

And so she had, as far as we could see. She 
was lying restfully on the bank of a little stream, 
her head in the air, singing that long, lonesome 
strain which Uncle Jethro called her possum- 
talk. It was a wonderfully faithful reproduction 
of her master's camp-meeting singing. One of 
his weird, wordless melodies seemed to have 
passed into the old dog's soul. 

But what was she calling us for? As we came 
up we looked around for the tree, the stump, the 
fallen log ; but there was not a splinter in sight. 
Uncle Jethro was getting nervous. Calamity 
rose, as we approached, and pushed her muzzle 
into a muskrat's smooth, black hole. This was 

[15] 




too much. She saw it, and hung her head, for 
she knew what was coming. 

"Look yhere, yo' obtuscious ol' fool. W'at 
yo' 'sociatin' wid a low-down possum as takes V 
mus'rats' holes'? Wat I done tol' yo' 'bout 
dis ? Go 'long home ! Go 'long en talk de 
moon up a tree." And as Uncle Jethro dropped 
upon his knees by the hole, Calamity slunk 
away through the brush. 

I held up a bunch of freshly washed grass- 
roots. 

" Uncle Jeth, this must be a new species of 
possum ; he eats roots like any muskrat," I 
said innocently. 

It was good for Calamity not to be there just 
then. Uncle Jethro loved her as he would have 
loved a child ; but he vowed, as he picked up his 
gun : "De nex' time dat no-'count dog don't talk 
possum, yo' '11 see de buzzard 'bout, yo' will." 

We tramped up the hill and on through the 
woods to some open fields. Here on the fence 
we waited for Calamity's signal. 

"Did you say you would n't put any price on 
Calamity, Uncle Jethro % " I asked as we waited. 

There was no reply. 

[16] 



" Here on the 
fence we waited.' 



"Going to roast this possum, are n't you?" 

Silence. 

"Am I going to have an invite, Uncle Jeth?" 

"Hush up, boy ! How we gwine yhear w'at 
dat dog say?" 

"Calamity'? Why, did n't you tell her to go 
home? " 

The woods were still. A little screech-owl 
off in the trees was the only creature that dis- 
turbed the brittle silence. The owl was flitting 
from perch to perch, coming nearer us. 

"Wat dat owl say ? " whispered Uncle Jethro, 
starting. " c No possum '! 'no possum '?'no pos- 
sum ' ? Come 'long home, boy," he commanded 
aloud. "Wen ol' Miss Owl say 'No possum,' 
C'lamity herself ain't gwine git none." And 
sliding to the ground, he trudged off for home. 

We were back again in the corn-field with 
an empty sack. The moon was riding high near 
eleven o'clock. From behind a shock Calamity 
joined us, falling in at the rear like one of our 
shadows. Of course Uncle Jethro did not see 
her. He was proud of the rheumatic old hound, 
and a night like this nipped his pride as the 
first frosts nip the lima-beans. 

[17] 



It was the owl's evil doing, he argued all the 
way home. "Wen ol' Miss Owl say 'Stay in' — 

no use : 

'Simmons sweet, 'simmons red, 
Ain't no possum leave his bed. 

All de dogs in Mount Zion won't fin' no pos- 
sum out dis night." 

No ; it was not Calamity's fault : it was Miss 
Owl's. 

We were turning in back of the barn when 
there came a sudden yelp, sharp as a pistol-shot, 
and Calamity darted through Uncle Jethro's 
legs, almost upsetting him, making straight for 
the yard. At the same moment I caught sight 
of a large creature hurrying with a wabbly, 
uncertain gait along the ridge-pole of the hen- 
house. 

It was a possum— as big as a coon. He was 
already half-way down the side of the coop ; but 
Calamity was below him, howling like mad. 

Uncle Jethro nearly unjointed himself. Be- 
fore the frightened animal had time to faint, the 
triumphant hunter was jouncing him up and 
down inside the sack, and promising the bones 
and baking-pan to Calamity. 

[18] 



"Wat dat yo' mumblin', boy! Gwine ax 

yo'self a' invite"? G 7 'way; g' 'way ; yo' don' 

lak possum. Wat dat yo' sayin' 'g'in' C'lamity % 

Yo' 's needin' sleep, chil', yo' is. Ain't I done 

tor yo' dat dog gwine talk possum by-um-bit? 

Wat dem 'flections 'g'in' oF Miss Owl? 

Boosh, boy ! Dat all fool-talk, w'at oF Miss 

Owl say. We done been lay in' low jis s' prise 

yo', me an' C'lamitv an' oF Miss Owl has." 

And as lie placed the chopping-block upon the 

barrel to keep the possum safe till morning, he 

began again : 

" Coon he up a gum-tree, 
Possum in de holla; 
Coon he roll hi'self in ha'r, 
Possum roll in talla. 

" Lawd, I wunda, who kilt John Henry, 
In de la-ane, in de lane." 

The next morning Uncle Jethro went to get 
his possum. But the possum was gone. The 
chopping-block lay on the woodshed floor, the 
cover of the barrel was pushed aside, and the 
only trace of the animal was a bundle of seed- 
corn that he had pulled from a nail overhead 
and left half eaten on the floor. He had stopped 
for a meal on his way out. 

[19] 



Uncle Jethro, with Uncle Remus, gives Br'er 
Babbit the wreath for craft ; but in truth the 
laurel belongs to Br'er Possum. He is an eter- 
nal surprise. Either he is the most stupidly 
wise animal of the woods, or the most wisely 



" He had stopped for a 
meal on his way out." 




stupid. He is a puzzle. Apparently his one 
unburied talent is heaviness. Joe, the fat boy, 
was not a sounder nor more constant sleeper, 
nor was his mental machinery any slower than 
the possum's. The little beast is utterly want- 
ing in swiftness and weapons, his sole hope and 
defense being luck and indifference. To luck 
and indifference he trusts life and happiness. 
And who can say he does not prosper — that he 
does not roll in fat ? 

I suppose there once were deer and otter in 

[20] 



the stretches of wild woodland along the Cohan- 
sey ; but a fox is rare here now, and the coon 
by no means abundant. Indeed, the rabbit, 
even with the help of the game laws, has a hard 
time. Yet the possum, unprotected by law, 
slow of foot, slower of thought, and worth fifty 
cents in any market, still flourishes along the 
creek. 

A greyhound must push to overtake a rabbit, 
but I have run down a possum with my winter 
boots on in less than half-way across a clean 
ten-acre field. He ambles along like a bear, 
swinging his head from side to side to see how 
fast you are gaining upon him. When you 
come up and touch him with your foot, over he 
goes, grunting and grinning with his mouth 
wide open. If you nudge him further, or bark, 
he will die — but he will come to life again when 
you turn your back. 

Some scientifically minded people believe 
that this "playing possum " follows as a physio- 
logical effect of fear ; that is, they say the pulse 
slackens, the temperature falls, and, as a result, 
instead of a pretense of being dead, the poor 
possum actually swoons. 

[21] 




A physiologist in his laboratory, with stetho- 
scope, sphygmoscope, thermometer, and pneu- 
monometer, may be able to scare a possum into 
a fit— I should say he might ; but I doubt if a 
plain naturalist in the woods, with only his two 
eyes, a jack-knife, and a bit of string, was ever 
able to make the possum do more than "play 
possum." 

We will try to believe with the laboratory 
investigator that the possum does genuinely 
faint. However, it will not be rank heresy to 
run over this leaf from my diary. It records a 
faithful diagnosis of the case as I observed it. 
The statement does not claim to be scientific ; 
I mean that there were no 'meters or 'scopes 
of any kind used. It is simply what I saw and 
have seen a hundred times. Here is the entry : 

POSSUM-FAINT 

Cause. My sudden appearance before the patient. 

Symptoms. A backing away with open mouth and 
unpleasant hisses until forcibly stopped, when the 
patient falls on one side, limp and helpless, a long, 
unearthly smile overspreading the face ; the off eye 
closed, the near eye just ajar ; no muscular twitching, 
but most decided attempts to get up and run as soon 
as my back is turned. 

[22] 







Playing possum. 



Treatment. My non-interference. 

Note. Recovery instantaneous with my removal 
ten feet. This whole performance repeated twelve 
times in as many minutes. 

December 26, 1893. 

I have known the possum too long for a ready 
faith in his extreme nervousness, too long to 
believe him so hysterical that the least surprise 
can frighten him into fits. He has a reasonable 
fear of dogs ; no fear at all of cats ; and will 
take his chances any night with a coon for the 
possession of a hollow log. He will live in the 
same burrow with other possums, with owls, — 
with anything in fact, — and overlook any bear- 
able imposition ; he will run away from every- 
thing, venture anywhere, and manage to escape 
from the most impossible situations. Is this an 
epileptic, an unstrung, flighty creature? Pos- 
sibly : but look at him. He rolls in fat j and 
how long has obesity been the peculiar accom- 
paniment of nervousness 1 ? 

It is the amazing coolness of the possum, 
however, that most completely disposes of the 
scientist's pathetic tale of unsteady nerves. A 
creature that will deliberately walk into a trap, 

[23] 



spring it, eat the bait, then calmly lie down and 
sleep until the trapper comes, has no nerves. 
I nsed to catch a possum, now and then, in the 
box-traps set for rabbits. It is a delicate task 
to take a rabbit from such a trap ; for, give him 
a crack of chance and away he bolts to freedom. 
Open the lid carefully when there is a possum 
inside, and you will find the old fellow curled 
up with a sweet smile of peace on his face, fast 
asleep. Shake the trap, and he rouses yawn- 
ingly, with a mildly injured air, offended at your 
rudeness, and wanting to know why you should 
wake an innocent possum from so safe and com- 
fortable a bed. He blinks at you inquiringly 
and says : " Please, sir, if you will be so kind as 
to shut the door and go away, I will finish my 
nap." And while he is saying it, before your 
very eyes, off to sleep he goes. 

Is this nervousness'? What, then, is it— stu- 
pidity or insolence? 

Physically as well as psychologically the pos- 
sums are out of the ordinary. As every one 
knows, they are marsupials ; that is, they have 
a pouch or pocket on the abdomen in which they 
carry the young. Into this pocket the young 

[24] 



are transferred as soon as they are born, and were 
it not for this strange half-way house along the 
journey of their development they would perish. 

At birth a possum is little more than formed— 
the least mature babe among all of our mam- 
mals. It is only half an inch long, blind, deaf, 
naked, and so weak and helpless as to be unable 
to open its mouth or even cry. Such babies are 
rare. The smallest young mice you ever saw 
are as large as possums at their birth. They 
weigh only about four grains, the largest of 
them, and are so very tiny that the mother 
has to fasten each to a teat and force the milk 
down each wee throat— for they cannot even 
swallow. 

They live in this cradle for about five weeks, 
by which time they can creep out and climb over 
their mother. They are then about the size of 
full-grown mice, and the dearest of wood babies. 
They have sharp pink noses, snapping black eyes, 
gray fur, and the longest, barest tails. I think 
that the most interesting picture I ever saw in 
the woods was an old mother possum with eleven 
little ones clinging to her. She was standing off 
a dog as I came up. and every one of the eleven 

[25] 



was peeking out, immensely enjoying this first 
adventure. The quizzing snouts of six were 
poked out in a bunch from the cradle-pouch, 
while the other five mites were upon their 
mother's back, where they had been playing 
Jack-and-the -beanstalk up and down her tail. 

Historically, also, the possum is a conundrum. 
He has not a single relative on this continent, 



'1Y~ 








^P'Vcs. rfet\i/A 



" She was standing off a dog." 



except those on exhibition in zoological gardens. 
He left kith and kin behind in Australia when 
he came over to our country. How he got here, 
and when, we do not know. Clouds hang heavy 
over the voyages of all the discoverers of Amer- 

[26] 



A 



ica. The possum was one of the first to 
find us, and when did he land, I wonder? 
How long before Columbus, and Leif, son 
of Eric? 

In his appetite the possum is 
no way peculiar, except, per- 
haps, that he takes the seasons' ^>, 
menus entire. Between persimmon- 
times he eats all sorts of animal food, 
and is a much better hunter than we usually 
give him credit for. Considering his slowness, 
too, he manages to plod over an amazing 
amount of territory in the course of his evening 
rambles. He starts out at dusk, and wanders 
around all night, planning his hunt so as to 

get back to his lair by dawn. Sometimes at 

H 
daybreak he is a long way from home. ]N"ot 

being able to see well in the light, and rather 

than run into needless danger, he then crawls 

into the nearest hole or under the first rail-pile 

he comes to j or else he climbs a tree, and, 

wrapping his tail about a limb, settles 

himself comfortably in a forked branch 

quite out of sight, and sleeps till dark- \ . 1 1, 

ness comes again. 

[27] 



On these expeditions he picks up frogs, fish, 
eggs, birds, mice, corn, and in winter a chicken 
here and there. 

In the edge of a piece of woods along the 
Cohansey there nsed to stand a large hen-coop 
surrounded by a ten-foot fence of wire netting. 
One winter several chickens were missing here, 
and though rats and other prowlers about the 
pen were caught, still the chickens continued to 
disappear. 

One morning a possum was seen to descend 
the wire fence and enter the coop through the 
small square door used by the fowls. We ran 
in ; but there was no possum to be found. We 
thought we had searched everywhere until, 
finally, one of us lifted the lids off a rusty old 
stove that had been used to heat the coop the 
winter before, and there was the possum, with 
two companions, snug and warm, in a nest of 
feathers on the grate. 

Here were the remains of the lost chickens. 
These sly thieves had camped in this stove ever 
since autumn, crawling in and out through the 
stovepipe hole. During the day they slept 
quietly ; and at night, when the chickens were 

[28] 



at roost, the old rascals would slip out ? grab the 
nearest one, pull it into the stove, and feast. 

Is there anything on record in the way of 
audacity better than that? 




fi" • QB^ 



[29] 



BIRDS' WINTER BEDS 




BIKDS' WINTER BEDS 

The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold. 

A STORM had been raging from the north- 
east all day. Toward evening the wind 
strengthened to a gale, and the fine, icy snow 
swirled and drifted over the frozen fields. 

I lay a long time listening to the wild sym- 
phony of the winds, thankful for the roof over 
my head, and wondering how the hungry, home- 
less creatures out of doors would pass the night. 
Where do the birds sleep such nights as this? 
Where in this bitter cold, this darkness and 
storm, will they make their beds? The lark 
that broke from the snow at my feet as I crossed 
the pasture this afternoon — 
3 [33] 



What comes o' thee? 
Whar wilt thou cow'r thy chittering wing, 
An' close thy e'e? 

The storm grew fiercer ; the wind roared 
through the big pines by the side of the house 
and swept hoarsely on across the fields ; the 
pines shivered and groaned, and their long 
limbs scraped over the shingles above me as if 
feeling with frozen fingers for a way in ; the 
windows rattled, the cracks and corners of the 
old farm-house shrieked, and a long, thin line of 
snow sifted in from beneath the window across 
the garret floor. I fancied these sounds of the 
storm were the voices of freezing birds, crying 
to be taken in from the cold. Once I thought 
I heard a thud against the window, a sound 
heavier than the rattle of the snow. Something 
seemed to be beating at the glass. It might be 
a bird. I got out of bed to look ; but there 
was only the ghostly face of the snow pressed 
against the panes, half-way to the window's top. 
I imagined that I heard the thud again ; but, 
while listening, fell asleep and dreamed that 
my window was frozen fast, and that all the 
birds in the world were knocking at it, trying 
to get in out of the night and storm. 

[34] 



The fields lay pure and white and flooded with 
sunshine when I awoke. Jumping out of bed, 
I ran to the window, and saw a dark object on 
the sill outside. I raised the sash, and there, 
close against the glass, were two quails — frozen 
stiff in the snow. It was they I heard the 
night before fluttering at the window. The 
ground had been covered deep with snow for 
several days, and at last, driven by hunger and 
cold from the fields, they saw my light, and 
sought shelter from the storm and a bed for 
the night with me. 

Four others, evidently of the same covey, 
spent the night in the wagon-house, and in the 
morning helped themselves fearlessly to the 
chickens' breakfast. They roosted with the 
chickens several nights, but took to the fields 
again as soon as the snow began to melt. 

It is easy to account for our winter birds dur- 
ing the day. Along near noon, when it is warm 
and bright, you will find the sparrows, chicka- 
dees, and goldfinches searching busily among 
the bushes and weeds for food, and the crows 
and jays scouring the fields. But what about 
them during the dark? Where do they pass 
the long winter nights'? 

[35] 



Why, they have nests, you say. Yes, they had 
nests in the summer, and then, perhaps, one of 
the parent birds may be said to have slept in the 
nest during the weeks of incubation and rearing 
of the young. But nests are cradles, not beds, 
and are never used by even the young birds from 
the day they leave them. Muskrats build houses, 
foxes have holes, and squirrels sleep in true nests ; 
but of the birds it can be said, "they have not 
where to lay their heads." They sleep upon 
their feet in the grass, in hollow trees, and among 
the branches j but, at best, such a bed is no more 
than a roost. A large part of the year this roost 
is new every night, so that the question of a 
sleeping-place during the winter is most serious. 

The cheerful little goldfinches, that bend the 
dried ragweeds and grass-stalks down and scatter 
their chaff over the snow, sleep in the thick 
cedars and pines. These warm, close-limbed 
evergreens I have found to be the lodging-houses 
of many of the smaller winter birds— the fox- 
colored sparrow, snowbird, crossbill, and some- 
times of the chickadee, though he usually tucks 
his little black cap under his wing in a wood- 
pecker's hole. 

[36] 



1 ' The cheerful little gold- 
finches, that bend the dried 
ragweeds." 



The meadow-larks always 
roost upon the ground. They 
creep well under the grass, or, if 
the wind is high and it snows, they 
squat close to the ground behind a 
tuft of grass or thick bush and sleep 
while the cold white flakes fall about 
them. They are often covered before the morn- 
ing 5 and when housed thus from the wind and 
hidden from prowling enemies, no bird could 
wish for a cozier, warmer, safer bed. 

But what a lonely bed it is ! Nothing seems 

[37] 




so utterly homeless and solitary as a meadow- 
lark after the winter nightfall. In the middle 
of a wide, snow-covered pasture one will occa- 
sionally spring from under your feet, scattering 
the snow that covered hiin, and go whirring 
away through the dusk, lost instantly in the 
darkness — a single little life in the wild, bleak 
wilderness of winter fields ! 

Again, the grass is often a dangerous bed. On 
the day before the great March blizzard of 1888, 
the larks were whistling merrily from the fences, 
with just a touch of spring in their call. At 
noon I noted no signs of storm, but by four 
o'clock — an hour earlier than usual — the larks 
had disappeared. They rose here and there 
from the grass as I crossed the fields, not as they 
do when feeding, far ahead of me, but close to 
my feet. They had gone to bed. By early even- 
ing the snow began to fall, and for two days 
continued furiously. 

A week later, when the deep drifts melted, I 
found several larks that had perished from cold 
or starvation or had smothered under the 
weight of snow. 

There is something of awe in the thought of a 

[38] 



bird nestling close beneath a snow-laden bush in 
a broad meadow, or clinging fast to a limb in 
the swaying top of some tall tree, rocked in its 
great arms through the night by a winter gale. 
All trees, even the pines and cedars, are fearfully 
exposed sleeping-places, and death from cold is 
not infrequent among the birds that take beds 
in them. 

The pine barrens, and especially certain pine 
clumps along Cohansey Creek and at the head 
of Cubby Hollow, used to be famous crow-roosts. 
Thousands of the birds, a few years ago, fre- 
quented these pieces of wood in the winter. 
About the middle of the afternoon, during the 
severest weather, they begin to fly over to the 
roost at the head of the Hollow, coming in from 
the surrounding fields, some of them from miles 
away, where they have been foraging all day 
for food. You can tell the character of the 
weather by the manner of their flight. In the 
fall and spring they went over cawing, chasing 
each other and performing in the air ; they were 
happy, and life was as abundant as the spring 
promise or the autumn fullness everywhere. But 
in January the land is bare and hard, and life 

[39] 



correspondingly lean and cheerless. You see it 
in their heavy, dispirited flight j all their spring 
joyousness is gone ; they pass over silent and 
somber, reluctant to leave the fields, and fearful 
of the night. There is not a croak as they settle 
among the pines — scores, sometimes hundreds of 
them, in a single tree. 

Here, in the swaying tops, amid the heavy 
roar of the winds, they sleep. You need have 
no fear of waking them as you steal through the 
shadows beneath the trees. The thick mat of 
needles or the sifted snow muffles your footfalls j 
and the winds still the breaking branches and 
snapping twigs. What a bed in a winter storm ! 
The sky is just light enough for you to distinguish 
the dim outlines of the sleepers as they rock in 
the waves of the dark green that rise and fall 
above you ; the trees moan, the branches shiver 
and creak, and high above all, around and be- 
neath you, filling the recesses of the dark wo od 
rolls the volume of the storm. 

But the crows sleep on, however high the 
winds. They sit close to the branches, that the 
feathers may cover their clinging feet 5 they 
tuck their heads beneath their wing- coverts, 

[40] 



thus protecting the whole body, except one 
side of the head, which the feathers of the wing 
cannot quite shelter. This leaves an eye ex- 
posed, and this eye, like the heel of Achilles, 
proves to be the one vulnerable spot. It freezes 
in very severe weather, causing a slow, painful 
death. In the morning, after an unusually cold 
night, you can find dozens of crows flapping 
piteously about in the trees of the roost and 
upon the ground, with frozen eyes. In Janu- 
ary, 1895, I saw very many of them along the 
Hollow, blind in one eye or in both eyes, dying 
of pain and starvation. It was pitiful to see 
their sufferings. The snow in places was 
sprinkled with their broken feathers, and with 
pine-needles which they had plucked off and 
tried to eat. Nothing could be done for the 
poor things. I have tried time and again to 
doctor them ; but they were sure to die in the 
end. 

Who has not wondered, as he has seen the 
red rim of the sun sink down in the sea, where 
the little brood of Mother Carey's chickens 
skimming round the vessel would sleep that 
night? Or who, as he hears the honking of geese 

[41] 



overhead in the darkness, has not questioned by 

what 

. . . plashy brink 
Of weedy lake, or marge of river wide, 

Or where the rocking billows rise and sink 
On the chafed ocean-side, 

they will find rest? 

In winter, when a heavy southeast wind is 
blowing, the tides of Delaware Bay are high and 
the waters very rough. Then the ducks that 
feed along the reedy flats of the bay are driven 
into the quieter water of the creeks, and at 
night fly into the marshes, where they find safe 
beds in the "salt-holes." 

The salt-holes are sheets of water having no 
outlet, with clean perpendicular sides as if cut 
out of the grassy marsh, varying in size from a 
few feet wide to an acre in extent. The sedges 
grow luxuriantly around their margins, making 
a thick, low wall in winter, against which the 
winds blow in vain. If a bird must sleep in the 
water, such a hole comes as near to being a per- 
fect cradle as anything could be, short of the 
bottom of a well. 

The ducks come in soon after dark. You 
can hear the whistle of their wings as they pass 

[42] 



just above your head, skimming along the 
marsh. They settle in a hole, swim close up to the 
windward shore, beneath the sedges, and, with 
their heads under their wings, go fast asleep. 
And as they sleep the ice begins to form — first, 
along their side of the hole, where the water is 
calmest ; then, extending out around them, it 
becomes a hard sheet across the surface. 

A night that will freeze a salt-hole is not one 
in which there is likely to be much hunting 
done by man or beast. But I have been on the 
marshes such nights, and so have smaller and 
more justified hunters. It is not a difficult feat 
to surprise the sleeping ducks. The ice is half 
an inch thick when you come up, and seals the 
hole completely, save immediately about the 
bodies of the birds. Their first impulse, when 
taken thus at close range, is to dive ; and down 
they go, turning in their tracks. 

Will they get out? One may chance to 
strike the hole which his warm body kept 
open, as he rises to breathe ; but it is more 
likely that he will come up under the ice, and 
drown. I have occasionally found a dead duck 
beneath the ice or floating in the water of a 

[43] 



salt-hole. It had been surprised, no doubt, 
while sleeping, and, diving in fright, was 
drowned under the ice, which had silently 
spread like a strange, dreadful covering over 
its bed. 

Probably the life of no other of our winter 
birds is so full of hardship as is that of the 
quail, Bob White. 

In the early summer the quails are hatched 
in broods of from ten to twenty, and live as 
families until the pairing season the next spring. 
The chicks keep close to the neighborhood of 
the home nest, feeding and roosting together, 
under the guidance of the parent birds. But 
this happy union is soon broken by the advent 
of the gunning season. It is seldom that a bevy 
escapes this period whole and uninjured. In- 
deed, if one of the brood is left to welcome the 
spring it is little less than a miracle. 

I have often heard the scattered, frightened 
families called together after a day of hard 
shooting ; and once, in the old pasture to the 
north of Cubby Hollow, I saw the bevy assemble. 

It was long after sunset, but the snow so dif- 
fused the light that I could see pretty well. In 

[44] 




'• There she stood in the 
snow with head high, 
listening anxiously." 

climbing the fence into the pasture, 

I had started a rabbit, and was creep- 

ing up behind a low cedar, when a quail, 

very near me, whistled softly, Whirl-eel The 
cedar was between us. Whirl-ee, whirl-ee-gig ! 
she whistled again. 

It was the sweetest bird-note I ever heard, 
being so low, so liquid, so mellow that I almost 
doubted if Bob White could make it. But there 
she stood in the snow with head high, listening 
anxiously. Again she whistled, louder this time ; 
and from the woods below came a faint answer- 
ing call : White ! The answer seemed to break 
a spell 5 and on three sides of me sounded 
other calls. At this the little signaler repeated 
her efforts, and each time the answers came 
louder and nearer. Presently something dark 
hurried by me over the snow and joined the 

[45] 



quail I was watching. It was one of the covey 
that I had heard call from the woods. 

Again and again the signal was sent forth 
until a third, fourth, and finally a fifth were 
grouped about the leader. There was just an 
audible twitter of welcome and gratitude ex- 
changed as each new-comer made his appearance. 
Once more the whistle sounded ; but this time 
there was no response across the silent field. 

The quails made their way to a thick cedar 
that spread out over the ground, and, huddling 
together in a close bunch under this, they mur- 
mured something soft and low among themselves 
and — dreamed. 

Some of the family were evidently missing, 
and I crept away, sorry that even one had been 
taken from the little brood. 




" And — dreamed. 



SOME SNUG WINTER BEDS 



V 



SOME SNUG WINTEE BEDS 



XT was a cold, desolate January day. Scarcely 
a sprig of green showed in the wide land- 
scape, except where the pines stood in a long 
blur against the gray sky. There was not a sign 
that anything living remained in the snow-buried 
fields, nor in the empty woods, shivering and 
looking all the more uncovered and cold under 
their mantle of snow, until a solitary crow 
flapped heavily over toward the pines in search 
of an early bed for the night. 

The bird reminded me that I, too, should be 
turning toward the pines ; for the dull gray 
afternoon was thickening into night, and my 

[49] 



bed lay beyond the woods, a long tramp through 
the snow. 

As the black creature grew small in the dis- 
tance and vanished among the trees, I felt a 
pang of pity for him. I knew by his flight that 
he was hungry and weary and cold. Every 
labored stroke of his unsteady wings told of a 
long struggle with the winter death. He was 
silent j and his muteness spoke the foreboding 
and dread with which he faced another bitter 
night in the pines. 

The snow was half-way to my knees $ and still 
another storm was brewing. All day the leaden 
sky had been closing in, weighed down by the 
snow-filled air. That hush which so often pre- 
cedes the severest winter storms brooded every- 
where. The winds were in leash— no, not in 
leash ; for had my ears been as keen as those of 
the creatures about me, I might even now have 
heard them baying far away to the north. It 
was not the winds that were still j it was the 
fields and forests that quailed before the onset 
of the storm. 

I skirted ILupton's Pond and saw the muskrat 
village, a collection of white mounds out in the 

[50] 



ice, and coming on to Cubby Hollow, I crossed on 
the ice, ascended the hill, and keeping in the 
edge of the swamp, left the pines a distance to 
the left, A chickadee, as if oppressed by the 
silence and loneliness among the trees, and un- 
easy in his stout little heart at the threatening 
storm, flew into the bushes as near to me as he 
could get, and, apparently for the sake of com- 
panionship, followed me along the path, cheep- 
ing plaintively. 

As I emerged from the woods into a corn- 
field and turned to look over at the gloomy 
pines, a snowflake fell softly upon my arm. The 
storm had begun. Now the half-starved crows 
came flocking in by hundreds, hurrying to roost 
before the darkness should overtake them. A 
biting wind was rising ; already I could hear it 
soughing through the pines. There was some- 
thing fascinating in the oncoming monster, and 
backing up behind a corn-shock, I stopped a 
little to watch the sweep of its white winds be- 
tween me and the dark, sounding pines. 

I shivered as the icy flakes fell thicker and 
faster. How the wild, unhoused things must 
suffer to-night ! I thought, as the weary pro- 

[51] 



cession of crows beat on toward the trees. 
Presently there was a small stir within the 
corn-shock. I laid my ear to the stalks and 
listened. Mice ! I could hear them moving 
around in there. It was with relief that I felt 
that here, at least, was a little people whom 
the cold and night could not hurt. 

These mice were" as warmly sheltered inside 
this great shock as I should be in my furnace - 
warmed home. Their tiny nests of corn-silk, 
hidden away, perhaps, within the stiff, empty 
husks at the shock's very center, could never 
be wet by a drop of the most driving rain nor 
reached by the most searching frosts. And not 
a mouse of them feared starvation. A plenty 
of nubbins had been left from the husking, and 
they would have corn for the shelling far into the 
spring — if the fodder and their homes should be 
left to them so long. 

I floundered on toward home. In the gather- 
ing night, amid the swirl of the snow, the 
shocks seemed like spectral tents pitched up 
and down some ghostly camp. But the specters 
and ghosts were all with me, all out in the 
whirling storm. The mice knew nothing of 

[53] 



wandering, shivering spirits j they nibbled their 
corn and squeaked in snug contentment ; for 
only dreams of the winter come to them in 
there. 

These shock-dwellers were the common house- 
mice, Mus musculus. But they are not the only 
mice that have warm beds in winter. In fact, 
bed-making is a specialty among the mice. 

Zapus, the jumping-mouse, the exquisite little 
fellow with the long tail and kangaroo legs, has 
made his nest of leaves and grass down in the 
ground, where he lies in a tiny ball just out of 
the frost's reach, fast asleep. He will be plowed 
out of bed next spring, if his nest is in a field 
destined for corn or melons ; for Zapus is sure 
to oversleep. He is a very sound sleeper. The 
bluebirds, robins, and song-sparrows will have 
been back for weeks, the fields will be turning 
green, and as for the flowers, there will be a 
long procession of them started, before this 
pretty sleepy -head rubs his eyes, uncurls him- 
self, and digs his way out to see the new spring 
morning. 

Does this winter-long sleep seem to him only 
as a nap overnight 1 ? 

[54] 



Arvicola, the meadow-mouse, that duck-legged, 
stump-tailed, pot-bellied mouse whose paths 
you see everywhere iu the meadows and fields, 
stays wide awake all winter. He is not so ten- 




The meadow-mouse. 

der as Zapus. The cold does not bother him j 
he likes it. Up he comes from his underground 
nest, — or home, rather, for it is more than a 
mere sleeping-place, — and runs out into the 
snow like a boy. He dives and plunges about 
in the soft white drifts, plowing out roads that 

[55] 



crisscross and loop and lady's-chain and lead 
nowhere — simply for the fun of it. 

Fairies do wonderful things and live in im- 
possible castles ; but no fairy ever had a palace 
in fairy -land more impossible than this unfairy- 
like meadow-mouse had in my back yard. 

One February day I broke through the frozen 
crust of earth in the garden and opened a large 
pit in which forty bushels of beets were buried. 
I took out the beets, and, when near the bottom, 
I came upon a narrow tunnel running around 
the wall of the pit like the Whispering Gallery 
around the dome of St. Paul's. It completely 
circled the pit, was well traveled, and, without 
doubt, was the corridor of some small animal 
that had the great beet-pit for a winter home. 

There were numerous dark galleries branch- 
ing off from this main hallway, piercing out 
into the ground. Into one of these I put my 
finger, by way of discovery, thinking I might 
find the nest. I did find the nest— and more. 
The instant my finger entered the hole a sharp 
twinge shot up my arm, and I snatched away 
my hand with a large meadow-mouse fastened 
to the end of my finger, and clinging desperately 

[56] 



to her, lo ! two baby mice, little bigger than 
thimbles. 

In this mild and even temperature, four feet 
below the frozen surface of the garden, with 
never a care as to weather and provisions, dwelt 
this single family of meadow-mice. What a 
home it was ! A mansion, indeed, with rooms 
innumerable, and a main hall girdling a very 
mountain of juicy, sugary beets. This family 
could not complain of hard times. Besides the 
beets, the mice had harvested for themselves a 
number of cribs of clover-roots. These cribs, or 
bins, were in the shape of little pockets in the 
walls of the great gallery. Each contained a 
cupful of the thick, meaty tap-roots of clover, 
cut into lengths of about half an inch. If the 
beets should fail ( ! ), or cloy upon them, they 
had the roots to fall back on. 

It was absolutely dark here, and worse ; there 
was no way to get fresh air that I could see. Yet 
here two baby mice were born in the very dead 
of winter, and here they grew as strong and warm 
and happy as they would have grown had the 
season showered rose-petals instead of snow- 
flakes over the garden above. 

[57] 



Hesperomys is the rather woodsy name of the 
white-footed or deer-niouse, a shy, timid little 
creature dwelling in every wood, who, notwith- 
standing his abundance, is an utter stranger to 
most of us. We are more familiar with his tracks, 
however, than with even those of the squirrel 
and rabbit. His is that tiny double trail gal- 
loped across the snowy paths in the woods. We 
see them sprinkled over the snow everywhere ; 
but when have we seen the feet that left them ? 
Here goes a line of the wee prints from a hole 
in the snow near a stump over to the butt of 
a large pine. Whitefoot has gone for provender 
to one of his storehouses among the roots of the 
pine ; or maybe a neighbor lives here, and he 
has left his nest of bird-feathers in the stump 
to make a friendly call after the storm. 

A bed of downy feathers at the heart of a 
punky old stump beneath the snow would seem 
as much of a snuggery as ever a mouse could 
build 5 but it is not. Instead of a dark, warm 
chamber within a hollow stump, Whitefoot some- 
times goes to the opposite extreme, and climbs 
a leafless tree to an abandoned bird's nest, and 
fits this up for his winter home. Down by Cubby 

[58] 



Hollow I found a wood-thrush's nest in a slender 
swamp -maple, about fifteen feet from the ground. 
The young birds left it late in June ; and when 
Whitefoot moved in I do not know. But along 
in the winter I noticed that the nest looked sus- 
piciously round and full, as if it were roofed 
over. Perhaps the falling leaves had lodged in 
it, though this was hardly likely. So I went up 
to the sapling and tapped. My suspicions were 
correct. After some thumps, a sleepy, fright- 
ened face appeared through the side of the nest, 
and looked cautiously down at me. No one 
could mistake that pointed nose, those big ears, 
and the round pop-eyes so nearly dropping out 
with blinking. It was Whitefoot. I had dis- 
turbed his dreams, and he had hardly got his 
wits together yet, for he had never been awak- 
ened thus before. And what could wake him? 
The black-snakes are asleep, and there is not a 
coon or cat living that could climb this spindling 
maple. Free from these foes, Whitefoot has 
only the owls to fear, and I doubt if even the 
little screech-owl could flip through these inter- 
laced branches and catch the nimble -footed ten- 
ant of the nest. 

[59] 




It was "Whitefoot." 



In spite of the exposure this must be a warm 
bed. The walls are thick and well plastered with 
mud, and are packed inside with fine, shredded 
bark which the mouse himself has pulled from 
the dead chestnut limbs, or, more likely, has 
taken from a deserted crow's nest. The whole 
is thatched with a roof of shredded bark, so 
neatly laid that it sheds water perfectly. The 
entrance is on the side, just over the edge of 
the original structure, but so shielded by the 
extending roof that the rain and snow never beat 
in. The thrushes did their work well ; the nest 
is securely mortised into the forking branches ; 
and Whitefoot can sleep without a tremor 
through the wildest winter gale. Whenever 
the snow falls lightly a high white tower rises 
over the nest 5 and then the little haycock, 
lodged in the slender limbs so far above our 
heads, is a very castle indeed. 

High over the nest of the white-footed mouse, 
in the stiffened top of a tall red oak that stands 
on the brow of the hill, swings another winter 
bed. It is the bulky oak -leaf hammock of the 
gray squirrel. 

A hammock for a winter bed? Is there any- 

[61] 



thing snug and warm about a hammock'? Not 
much, true enough. From the outside the gray 
squirrel's leaf bed looks like the coldest, dead- 
liest place one could find in which to pass the 
winter. The leaves are loose and rattle in the 
wind like the clapboards of a tumble-down 
house. The limb threatens every moment to 
toss the clumsy nest out upon the storm. But 
the moorings hold, and if we could curl up with 
the sleeper in that swaying bed, we should rock 
and dream, and never feel a shiver through the 
homespun blankets of chestnut bark that wrap 
us round inside the flapping leaves. 

Be it never so cozy, a nest like this is far 
from a burrow — the bed of a fat, thick-headed 
dolt who sleeps away the winter. A glance into 
the stark, frozen top of the oak sends over us a 
chill of fright and admiration for the dweller 
up there. He cannot be an ease-lover ; neither 
can he know the meaning of fear. We should 
as soon think of a sailor's being afraid of the 
shrieking in the rigging overhead, as of this 
bold squirrel in the tree-tops dreading any 
danger that the winter winds might bring. 

There are winters when the gray squirrel 

[62] 




'• From his leafless height he looks down into the Hollow." 



stays in the hollow of some old tree. A secure 
and sensible harbor, this, in which to weather 
the heavy storms, and I wonder that a nest is 
ever anchored outside in the tree-tops. The 
woodsmen and other wiseacres say that the 
squirrels never build the tree-top nests except 
in anticipation of a mild winter. But weather 
wisdom, when the gray squirrel is the source, is 
as little wise as that which comes from Wash- 
ington or the almanac. I have found the nests 
in the tree -tops in the coldest, fiercest winters. 
It is not in anticipation of fine weather, but 

[63] 



a wild delight in the free, wild winter, that 
leads the gray squirrel to swing his hammock 
from the highest limb of the tallest oak that 
will hold it. He dares and defies the winds, and 
claims their freedom for his own. From his 
leafless height yonder he looks down into the 
Hollow npon the tops of the swamp trees where 
his dizzy roads run along the angled branches, 
and over the swamp to the dark pines, and over 
the pines, on, on across the miles of white fields 
which sweep away and away till they freeze 
with the frozen sky behind the snow-clouds that 
drift and pile. In his aery he knows the snarl 
and bite of the blizzard ; he feels the swell of 
the heaving Avaves that drive thick with snow 
out of the cold white north. Anchored far out 
in the tossing arms of the strong oak, his leaf nest 
rocks in the storm like a yawl in a heaving sea. 
But he loves the tumult and the terror. A 
night never fell upon the woods that awed him ; 
cold never crept into the trees that could chill 
his blood ; and the hoarse, mad winds that swirl 
and hiss about his pitching bed never shook a 
nerve in his round, beautiful body. How he 
must sleep ! And what a constitution he has ! 

[64] 



A BIRD OF THE DARK 




A BIED OF THE DARK 

THE world is never more than half asleep. 
jS"ight dawns and there is almost as wide a 
waking as with the dawn of day. We live in 
the glare till it leaves us blind to the forms that 
move through the dark ; we listen to the roar 
of the day till we can no longer hear the stir 
that begins with the night. But here in the 
darkness is life and movement, — wing-beats, foot- 
falls, cries, and calls, — all the wakefulness, strug- 
gle, and tragedy of the day. 

Whatever the dusk touches it quickens. 
Things of bare existence by day have life at 
night. The very rocks that are dead and inani- 
mate in the light get breath and being in the 
dark. What was mere substance now becomes 

[67] 



shadow, and shadow spirit, till all the day's dead 
live and move. The roads, fences, trees, and 
buildings become new creatures ; landmarks, 
distances, and places change ; new odors are on 
the winds ; strange lights appear ; soft footsteps 
pass and repass us ; and hidden voices whisper 
everywhere. The brightest day is not more 
awake j at high noon we are not more alert. 

One of the commonest of these night sounds 
is the cry of the whippoorwill. From the middle 
of April to the end of September it rings along 
the edge of the clearing j but how seldom we 
have seen the singer ! To most of us it is only 
a disembodied voice. Night has put her spell 
upon the whippoorwills and changed them from 
birds into wandering shadows and voices. There 
is something haunting in their call, a suggestion 
of fear, as though the birds were in flight, pur- 
sued by a shape in the gloom. It is the voice of 
the lost— the voice of the night trying to find 
its way back to the day. There is snap enough 
in the call if you happen to be near the bird. 
Usually the sound comes to us out of the dark- 
ness and distance — the loneliest, ghostliest cry of 
all the night. 

[68] 



It is little wonder that so many legends and 
omens follow the whippoorwill. How could our 
imaginations, with a bent for superstition, fail 
to work upon a creature so often heard, so rarely 
seen, of habits so dark and uncanny ? 

One cannot grow accustomed to the night. The 
eager, jostling, open-faced day has always been 
familiar ; but with the night, though she comes 
as often as the day, no number of returns can 
make us acquainted. Whatever is peculiarly 
her own shares her mystery. Who can get used 
to the bats flitting and squeaking about him in 
the dusk % Or who can keep his flesh from creep- 
ing when an owl bobs over him in the silence 
against a full moon? Or who, in the depths of a 
pine barren, can listen to a circle of whippoor- 
wills around him, and not stay his steps as one 
lost in the land of homeless, wailing spirits'? 
The continual shifting of the voices, the mock- 
ing echoes, and the hiding darkness combine in 
an effect altogether gruesome and unearthly. 

One may hear the whippoorwill every sum- 
mer of his life, but never see the bird. It is shy 
and wary, and, with the help of the darkness, 
manages to keep strangely out of sight. Though 

[69] 



it is not unusual to stumble upon one asleep by 
day, it is a rare experience to surprise one feed- 
ing or singing at night. 

One evening I was standing by a pump in an 
open yard, listening to the whippoorwills as 
they came out to the edge of the woods and 
called along the fields. The swamp ran up so 
close on this side of the house that faint puffs 
of magnolia and wild grape could be strained 
pure from the mingling odors in the sweet night 
air. The whippoorwills were so near that the 
introductory chuck and many of the finer, flute- 
like trills of their song, which are never heard at 
a distance, were clear and distinct. Presently 
one call sounded out above the others, and in- 
stantly rang again, just behind a row of currant- 
bushes not ten feet away. 

I strained my eyes for a glimpse of the creature, 
when swift wings fanned my face, and a dark, 
fluffy thing, as soft and noiseless as a shadow, 
dropped at my feet, and exploded with a triple 
cry of Whip-poor-will ! that startled me. It was 
a rapid, crackling, vigorous call that split through 
the night as a streak of lightning through a 
thunder-cloud. The farmers about here interpret 

[70] 



the notes to say, CracJc-the-whip ! and certainly, 
near by, this fits better than Whip-poor-will ! 

The bird was flitting abont the small plat- 
form upon which I stood. I remained as stiff 




"It caught at the 
insects in the air." 



as the pump, for which, evidently, it had mis- 
taken me. It was not still a moment, but 
tossed back and forth on wings that were abso- 
lutely silent, and caught at the insects in the air 
and uttered its piercing cry. It leaped rather 
than flew, sometimes calling on the wing, and 
always upon touching the ground. 

This is as good a view of the bird as I ever 
got at night. The darkness was too thick to 

[71] 



see what the food was it caught, or how it 
caught it. I could not make out a pose or a 
motion more than the general movements about 
the pump. The one other time that I have 
had a good look at the bird, when not asleep, 
showed him at play. 

It was an early August morning, between two 
and three o'clock. The only doctor in the vil- 
lage had been out all night at a little town 
about five miles away. He was wanted at once, 
and I volunteered to get him. 

Five miles is pure fun to a boy who has run 
barefoot every one of his fifteen summers ; so I 
rolled up my trousers, tightened my belt, and 
bent away for Shiloh at an easy dog-trot that, 
even yet, I believe I could keep up for half a 
day. 

There was not a glimmer in the east when I 
started. I had covered three miles, and was 
entering a long stretch of sprout-land when the 
dawn began. The road was dusty, and the 
dew-laid powder puffed beneath the soft, swift 
pats of my feet. Things began to stand out 
with some distinctness now as the pale light 
brightened. No wagons had been along, and 

[72] 



every mark of the night was plain. Here and 
there were broad, ragged-edged bands across the 
road — the trails of the wandering box-turtles. 
I saw the smooth, waving channel left by a snake 
that had just gone across. Here and there were 
bunches of rabbit tracks, and every little while 
appeared large spots in the road, where some 
bird had been dusting itself. 

Suddenly I made a sharp turn, and almost ran 
over a whippoorwill concealed in a very cloud 
of dust which she was flirting up with her wings. 
This explained the spots back along the road. 
The bird flew up and settled a few yards ahead 
of me, and took another hasty dip. This she 
kept up for nearly a quarter of a mile. 

The road was alive with whippoorwills. It 
was their bathing-hour, and playtime, too. The 
serious business of the night was done ; they had 
hunted through the first hours, and now it was 
time to be social. The light was coming rap- 
idly, and so was bedtime ; but they called and 
capered about me, playing away the narrowing 
night to the very edge of day. 

On my return, an hour later, the sun was 
looking over the tops of the " cut-offs," but he 

[73] 




did not see a whippoorwill. 
They were all roosting length- 
wise upon the logs and stumps 
back among the bushes. 

These unnatural, unbirdlike 
habits of the whippoorwill are 
matched by the appearance of 
the bird. The first time one 
sees a whippoorwill he ques- 
tions whether its shape and 
color are the result of its noc- 
turnal life or whether it took 
to the night to hide its un- 
beautiful self from the gaze of 
the day. 

It has ridiculously short 
legs, a mere point of a bill, 
and a bristled, head-dividing 
gap that would shame a frog. 
Looked at in the daylight, its 
color, too, is a meaningless 



mixture, as unreal and half done as the rest of 
the creature. But we should not be so hasty in 
our judgment. There is design in all things in 
nature ; utility is the first law of creation : and 
the discovery of plan and purpose is the highest 
appreciation of beauty. 

The whippoorwill's dress must be criticized 
from the view-point of its usefulness to the bird ; 
then it becomes one of the most exquisitely 
artistic garments worn. Compare it with that 
of any other bird, and your wonder at it grows. 
Another such blending of light and shadow can- 
not be found. The night herself seems to have 
woven this robe out of warp from the strands of 
early dawn and of woof spun from the twilight. 

The whippoorwill cannot change the color of 
its dress with the passing clouds, nor match it 
with the light green of unfolding leaves and the 
deep bronze of old tree-trunks, as the chameleon 
can. But the bird has no need of such control. 
It is always in harmony with its surroundings. 
In the falling twilight it seems a shadow among 
the shadows ; in the breaking dawn it melts into 
the gray half-light, a phantom ; at midnight it is 
only an echo in the dark ; and at noontime you 

[75] 



would pass the creature for a mossy knot, as it 
squats close to a limb or rail, sitting length wise, 
unlike any bird of the light. 

We need not expect a bird of such irregular 
habits as the whippoorwill to have the normal 
instincts of birds, even with regard to its off- 
spring. A bird given to roaming about at night, 
the companion of toads and bats and spooks, is 
not one that can be trusted to bring up young. 
You cannot count much on the domesticity of a 
bird that flits around with the shadows and fills 
the night with doleful, spellbinding cries. 

The nest of the whippoorwill is the bare 
ground, together with whatever leaves, pebbles, 
or bits of wood happen to be under the eggs when 
they are laid. I found a nest once by the side 
of a log in the woods, and by rarest good fortune 
missed putting my foot upon the eggs. Here 
there was no attempt at nest-building, not even 
a depression in the earth. There were two of 
the eggs,— the usual number, — long and creamy 
white, with mingled markings of lavender and 
reddish brown. Here, upon the log, one of the 
birds dozed away the day, while the mate on 
the nest brooded and slept till the gloaming. 

[76] 



The effect of this erratic life in the forest 
glooms and under the cover of night has been 
to make the whippoorwill careless of her home 
and negligent of her young. She has become a 
creature of omen, weird and wakeful, lingering 
behind the time of superstition to keep myths 
moving in our scanty groves and mystery still 
stirring through the dark rooms of the night. 




" Unlike any bird 
of the light." 



[77] 



THE PINE-TREE SWIFT 



THE PIJSTE-TKEE SWIFT 

I IN" any large museum you may see the fossil 
skeletons, or the casts of the skeletons, of 
those mammoth saurians of the Mesozoic Age. 
But you can go into the pine barrens any bright 
summer day and capture for yourself a real live 
saurian. The gloom of the pines is the lingering 
twilight of that far-off time, and the pine-tree 
lizard, or swift, is the lineal descendant of those 
reptile monsters who ruled the seas and the dry 
land before man was. 

Throughout southern New Jersey the pine- 
tree swifts abound. The worm-fences, rail-piles, 
bridges, stone-heaps, and, above all, the pine- 
trees are alive with them. They are the true 

[81] 



children of the pines, looking so like a very 
part of the trees that it seems they must have 
been made by snipping off the pitch-pines' scaly 
twigs and giving legs to them. They are the 
aborigines, the primitive people of the barrens ; 
and it is to the lean, sandy barrens yon must 
go if you would see the swifts at home. 

In these wide, silent wastes, where there are 
miles of scrub-pine without a clearing, where 
the blue, hazy air is laden with the odor of resin, 
where the soft glooms are mingled with softer, 
shyer lights, the swifts seem what they actually 
are — creatures of another, earlier world. When 
one darts over your foot and scurries up a tree 
to watch you, it is easy to imagine other ante- 
diluvian shapes moving in the deeper shadows 
beyond. How they rustle the leaves and scratch 
the rough pine bark ! They hurry from under 
your feet and peek around the tree- trunks intoi 
your face, their nails and scales scraping, while 
they themselves remain almost invisible on the 
deep browns of the pines j and if you are in- 
clined to be at all nervous, you will start and 
shiver. 

The uncanny name u lizard " is partly account- 

[82] 



able for our unpleasant feelings toward 
this really intelligent and interesting little 
beast. If he were more widely known as " swift," 
Sceloporus would be less detested. The z in "liz- 
ard" adds a creepy, crawly, sinister something 
to the name which even the wretched word 
"snake" does not suggest. "Swift," the com- 
mon name in some localities, is certainly more 
pleasing, and, at the same time, quite accurately 
descriptive. 

There is nothing deadly nor vicious, nor yet 
unlovely, about the swift, unless some may hate 
his reptile form and his scales. But he is 
strangely dreaded. The mere mention of him 
is enough to stampede a Sunday-school picnic. 
I know good people who kill every swift they 
meet, under the queer religious delusion that 
they are lopping off a limb of Satan. "All rep- 
tiles are cursed," one such zealot declared to 

[83] 



me, "and man is to bruise their heads." The 
good book of nature was not much read, evi- 
dently, by this student of the other Good 
Book. 

The swift is absolutely harmless. He is with- 
out fang, sting, or evil charm. He is not ex- 
actly orthodox, for he has a third eye in the top 
of his head, the scientists tell us ; but that eye is 
entirely hidden. It cannot bind nor leer, like 
Medusa. Otherwise the swift is a perfectly 
normal little creature, about six inches long 
from tip to tip, quick of foot, scaly, friendly, 
wonderfully colored in undulating browns and 
blues, and looking, on the whole, like a pretty 
little Noah's-ark alligator. 

On the south side of the clump of pines beyond 
Cubby Hollow is a pile of decaying rails where 
I have watched the swifts, and they me, for so 
many seasons that I fancy they know me. : 
Dewberry -vines and Virginia creeper clamber 
over the pile, and at one end, flaming all 
through July, burns a splendid bush of butter- 
fly-weed. The orange-red blossoms shine like 
a beacon against the dark of the pines, and lure 
a constant stream of insect visitors, who make 

[84] 



living for the swifts of this particular place rich 
and easy while the attraction lasts. 

Any hot day I can find several swifts here, 
and they are so tame that I can tickle them all 
off to sleep without the slightest trouble. They 
will look up quickly as I approach, fearless but 
alert, with head tilted and eyes snapping ; but 
not one stirs. With a long spear of Indian 
grass I reach out gently and stroke the nearest 
one. Shut go his eyes ; down drops his head ; 
he sleeps— at least, he pretends to. This is my 
peace greeting. Now I may sit down, and life 
upon the rail-pile will go normally on. 

Upon the end of a rail, so close to a cluster of 
the butterfly-weed blossoms that he can pick the 
honey -gatherers from it, — as you would pick 
olives from a dish on the table, — lies a big male 
swift without a tail. He lost that member in 
an encounter with me several weeks ago. A 
new one has started, but it is a mere bud yet. 
I know his sex by the brilliant blue stripe down 
each side, which is a favor not granted the fe- 
males. The sun is high and hot. " Fearfully 
hot," I say under my wide straw hat. "Delight- 
fully warm," says the lizard, sprawling over 

[85] 



the rail, his legs hanging, eyes half shut, every 
possible scale exposed to the blistering rays, and 
his bud of a tail twitching with the small spasms 
of exquisite comfort that shoot to the very ends 
of his being. 

The little Caliban ! How he loves the sun ! 
It cannot shine too hot nor too long upon him. 
He stiffens and has aches when it is cold, so he 
is a late riser, and appears not at all on dark, 
drizzly days. 

His nose is resting upon the rail like a drowsy 
scholar's upon the desk ; but he is not asleep : 
he sees every wasp and yellow-jacket that lights 
upon the luring flowers. He has learned some 
things about the wasp tribe ; and if any of them 
want honey from his butterfly-weed, they may 
have it. These come and go with the butterflies 
and hard-backed bugs, no notice being taken. 
But I hear the booming of a bluebottle -fly. 
Sceloporus hears him, too, and gathers his legs 
under him, alert. The fly has settled upon one 
of the flower-clusters. He fumbles among the 
blossoms, and pretty soon blunders upon those 
watched by the swift. Fatal blunder ! There 
is a quick scratching on the rail, a flash of brown 

[86] 



across the orange flowers, and the next thing I 
see is the swift, back in his place, throwing his 
head about in the air, licking down the stupid 
bluebottle-fly. 

A spider crawls over the rail behind him. 
He turns and snaps it up. A fly buzzes about 
his head, but he will not jump with all four feet, 
and so loses it. A humming-bird is fanning the 
butterfly-weed, and he looks on with interest not 
unmixed with fear. Now the bugs, butterflies, 
hornets, and wasps make up the motley crowd 
of visitants to his garden, and Sceloporus stretches 
out in the warmth again. He is hardly asleep 
when a bird's shadow passes across the rails. 
The sharp scratch of scales and claws is heard at 
half a dozen places on the pile at once, and every 
swift has ducked around his rail out of sight. 

An enemy ! The shadow sweeps on across 
the melon-field, and above in the sky I see a 
turkey-buzzard wheeling. This is no enemy. 
Evidently the swifts mistook the buzzard's 
shadow for that of the sharp -shinned hawk. 
Had it been the hawk, my little bobtailed 
friend might have been taking a dizzy ride 
through the air to some dead tree-top at that 

[87] 



moment, instead of peeking over his rail to see 
if the coast were clear. 

All the lesser hawks feed upon the swifts. I 
have often seen the sparrow-hawk perched upon 
a tall stake search- ^«^ ing the fences for 
them. Cats eat M them also. But they 

do not agree M with puss. They 

make a cat thin MmM 11 and morbid and un- 




" The sparrow- 
hawk searching the 
fences for them." 



happy. We can tell when the lizard-catching 
disease is upon Tom by his loss of appetite, his 
lankness 7 and his melancholy expression. 

[88] 



All fear of the hawk is passed, and the lizards 
come out into the light again. Presently one 
leaves the rails, runs over my foot, and dashes by 
short stages into the field. He is after a nest of 
ants, or is chasing a long-legged spider. It is 
worth while to follow them when they take to 
the fields, for they may let you into a secret, as 
they once did me. 

About a hundred feet into the melon-patch 
stands an old and very terrible scarecrow. It 
is quite without terrors for the swifts, however. 
Around this monster's feet the soil is bare and 
open to the sun. One day I discovered a lizard 
making her way thither, and I followed. She 
did not stop for ants or spiders, but whisked 
under the vines and hastened on as if bound on 
some urgent business. And so she was. 

When she reached the warm, open sand at 
the scarecrow's feet, she dug out a little hollow, 
and, to my utter amazement, deposited therein 
seven tough, yellowish, pea-like eggs, covered 
them with sand, and raced back to the rail-pile. 
That was all. Her maternal duties were done, 
her cares over. She had been a faithful mother 
to the last degree,— even to the covering up of 

[89] 



her eggs,— and now she left them to the kindly 
skies. About the middle of July they hatched, 
and, in finding their way to the rail-pile, they 
stopped at the first mound on the road, and 
began life in earnest upon a fiery dinner of red 
ants. 

It looks as if nature were partial in the care 
she takes of her children. How long she both- 
ers and fusses over us, for instance, and how, 
without one touch of parental care or interest, 
she tosses the lizard out, even before he is 
hatched, to shift for himself. If, however, we 
could eat red ants the day we are born and 
thrive on them, I suppose that our mothers, too, 
without much concern, might let us run. 

The day-old babies join their elders upon the 
rails, and are received with great good humor — 
with pleasure, indeed • for the old ones seem to 
enjoy the play of the youngsters, and allow them: 
to climb over their backs and claw and scratch 
them without remonstrance. The swifts are 
gentle, peaceable, and sweet-tempered. They 
rarely fight among themselves. The only time 
that I ever found one out of humor was when 
she was anxiously hunting for a place in which 

[90] 



to leave her eggs. The trouble of it all made 
her cross, and as I picked her up she tried to 
bite me. And I ought to have been bitten. 

Ordinarily, however, the swifts are remark- 
ably docile and friendly. If treated kindly, 
they will allow you to stroke them and handle 
them freely within a few minutes after capture. 
I have sometimes had them cling to my coat of 
their own will as I tramped about the woods. 
They hiss and open their mouths when first 
taken ; but their teeth could not prick one's 
skin if they did strike. 

They are clean, pretty, interesting pets to 
have about the house and yard. They are easily 
tamed, and, in spite of their agility, they are no 
trouble at all to capture. I have often caught 
them with my unaided hand ; but an almost 
sure way is to take a long culm of green grass, 
strip off the plume, and make a snood of the 
wire-like end. 

A swift is sunning himself upon a rail. He 
rises upon his front legs, as you approach, to 
watch you. Carefully now ! Don't try to get 
too near. You can just reach him. Now your 
snood is slipping over his nose ; it tickles him ; 

[91] 



lie enjoys it, and shuts his eyes. The grass loop 
is about his neck ; he discovers it, and— pull ! 
for he leaps. If the snood does not break you 
have him dangling in the air. Bring him to 
your coat now, and touch him lightly till his 
fear is dispelled, then loose him, and he will stay 
with you for hours. 

When upon a tree you may seize him with 
your bare hand by coming up from behind. 
But never try to catch him by the tail ; for liz- 
ards' tails were not made for that purpose, 
though, from their length and convenience to 
grasp, and from the careless way their owners 
have of leaving them sticking out, it seems as if 
nature intended them merely for handles. 

In my haste to catch the bobtailed lizard of 
the rail-pile, I carelessly clapped my hand upon 
his long, scaly tail, when, by a quick turn, he 
mysteriously unjointed himself from it, leaving 
the appendage with me, while he scampered off 
along the rails. He is now growing another 
tail for some future emergency. 

Between eating, sleeping, and dodging shad- 
ows, the lizards spend their day, and about the 
middle of the afternoon disappear. Where do 

[92] 



■■'■ 

they spend their night? They go somewhere 
from the dew and cold ; hut where % 

There is a space about two inches deep be- 
tween the window-sash and the net-frames in my 
room. Some time ago I put a number of swifts 
upon the netting, covered the window-sill with 
sand, and thus improvised an ideal lizard-cage. 
All I had to do to feed them was to raise the 
window, drive the flies from the room on to the 
netting, and close the sash. The lizards then 
caught them at their leisure. 

Two days after they were transferred here, and 
had begun to feel at home and fearless of me, 
I noticed, as night came on, that they de- 
scended from the netting and disappeared in the 
sand. I put my finger in and took one out, and 
found that the sand was much warmer than the 
dewy night air. 

This was their bed, and this explained the 
sleeping habits of the free, wild ones. The sand 
remains warm long after the sun sets and makes 
them a comfortable bed. Into the sand they go 
also to escape the winter. They must get down 
a foot or more to be rid of the frost ; and being 
poor diggers, they hunt up the hole of some 

[93] 



other creature, or work their way among the 
decayed roots of some old stump until below the 
danger-line. By the middle of September they 
have made their beds, and when they wake up ? 
the melons will be started and the May sunshine 
warm upon the rails. 




[94] 



IN THE OCTOBER MOON 




IN THE OCTOBER MOON 



A 1 



N October night, calm, crisp, and moonlit ! 
There is a delicate aroma from the falling 
leaves in the air, as sweet as the scent of fresh- 
filled haymows. The woods are silent, shadowy, 
and sleepfnl, lighted dimly by the moon, as a 
vague, happy dream lights the dark valley of our 
sleep. Dreamful is this night world, but yet not 
dreaming. When, in the highest noon, did every 
leaf, every breeze, seem so much a self, so full of 
ready life ? The very twigs that lie brittle and 
dead beneath our feet seem wakeful now and on 
the alert. In this silence we feel myriad mov- 
ings everywhere j and we know that this sleep 
7 [97] 



is but the sleep of the bivouac fires, that an army 
is breaking camp to move under cover of the 
night. Every wild thing that knows the dark 
will be stirring to-night. And what softest foot 
can fall without waking the woods ? 

Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn 

leaves lie dead; 
They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit's 

tread. 

Not a mouse can scurry, not a chestnut drop, 
not a wind whisper among these new-fallen 
leaves without discovery ; even a weasel cannot 
dart across the moon-washed path and not leave 
a streak of brown upon the silver, plain enough 
to follow. 

A morning in May is best of all the year to be 
afield with the birds ; but to watch for the wild 
four-footed things, a moonlight night in October 
is the choice of the seasons. May-time is bird-* 
time. That is their spring of mate-winning and 
nest-building, and it bubbles over with life and 
song. The birds are ardent lovers ; they some- 
times fight in their wooing : but fighting or sing- 
ing, they are frank, happy creatures, and always 
willing to see you. The mammals are just as 

[98] 



ardent lovers as the birds, and infinitely more 
serious. But they are not poets ; they are not 
in the show business ; and they want no out- 
sider to come and listen to their pretty story of 
woe. Their spring, their courting-time, is not a 
time of song and play. The love-affairs of a 
timid, soulful-eyed rabbit are so charged and in- 
tense as not always to be free from tragedy. 
Don't expect any attention in the spring, even 
from that bunch of consuming curiosity, the red 
squirrel ; he has something in hand, for once, 
more to his mind than quizzing you. Life with 
the animals then, and through the summer, has 
too much of love and fight and fury, is too 
terribly earnest, to admit of any frolic. 

But autumn brings release from most of these 
struggles. There is surcease of love ; there is 
abundance of food ; and now the only passions 
of the furry breasts are such gentle desires as 
abide with the curious and the lovers of peace 
and plenty. The animals are now engrossed 
with the task of growing fat and furry. 
Troubled with no higher ambitions, curiosity, 
sociability, and a thirst for adventure begin to 
work within them these long autumn nights, 
L.ofC. |- 99 -| 



and not one of them, however wild and fearful, 
can resist his bent to prowl in the light of the 
October moon. 

To know much of the wild animals at home 
one must live near their haunts, with eyes and 
ears open, forever on the watch. For you must 
wait their pleasure. You cannot entreat them 
for the sake of science, nor force them in the 
name of the law. You cannot set up your easel 
in the meadow, and hire a mink or muskrat to 
pose for you any time you wish ; neither can 
you call, when you like, at the hollow gum in 
the swamp and interview a coon. The animals 
flatly refuse to sit for their pictures, and to see 
reporters and assessors. But carry your sketch- 
book and pad with you, and, after a while, in 
the most unlikely times and places, the wariest 
will give you sittings for a finished picture, and 
the most reticent will tell you nearly all that ' 
he knows. 

At no time of the year are the animals so 
loquacious, so easy of approach, as along in the 
October nights. There is little to be seen of 
them by day. They are cautious folk. By na- 
ture most of them are nocturnal ; and when this 

[100] 



habit is not inherited, fear has led to its acqui- 
sition. But protected by the dark, the shy and 
suspicious creep out of their hiding-places ; they 
travel along the foot-paths, they play in the 
wagon-roads, they feed in our gardens, and I 
have known them to help themselves from our 
chicken-coops. If one has never haunted the 
fields and woods at night he little knows their 
multitude of wild life. Many a hollow stump 
and uninteresting hole in the ground— tombs 
by day — give up their dead at night, and some- 
thing more than ghostly shades come forth. 

If one's pulse quickens at the sight and sound 
of wild things stirring, and he has never seen, 
in the deepening dusk, a long, sniffling snout 
poked slowly out of a hollow chestnut, the glint 
of black, beady eyes, the twitch of papery ears, 
then a heavy-bodied possum issue from the hole, 
clasping the edge with its tail, to gaze calmly 
about before lumbering off among the shadows 
— then he still has something to go into the 
woods for. 

Our forests by daylight are rapidly being 
thinned into picnic groves ; the bears and pan- 
thers have disappeared, and by day there is 

[101] 



nothing to fear, nothing to give our imaginations 
exercise. But the night remains, and if we 
hunger for adventure, why, besides the night, 
here is the skunk ; and the two offer a pretty 
sure chance for excitement. Never to have 
stood face to face in a narrow path at night 
with a full-grown, leisurely skunk is to have 
missed excitement and suspense second only to 
the staring out of countenance of a green-eyed 
wildcat. It is surely worth while, in these days 
of parks and chipmunks, when all stir and ad- 
venture has fled the woods, to sally out at night 
for the mere sake of meeting a skunk, for the 
shock of standing before a beast that will not 
give you the path. As you back away from 
him you feel as if you were really escaping. If 
there is any genuine adventure left for us in 
this age of suburbs, we must be helped to it by 
the dark. 

Who ever had a good look at a muskrat in 
the glare of day? I was drifting noiselessly 
down the river, recently, when one started to 
cross just ahead of my boat. He got near 
midstream, recognized me, and went under like 
a flash. Even a glimpse like this cannot be had 

[102] 



every summer ; but in the autumn nights you 
cannot hide about their houses and fail to see 
them. In October they are building their win- 
ter lodges, and the clumsiest watcher may spy 




" In October they are building their winter lodges/' 

them glistening in the moonlight as they climb 
with loads of sedge and mud to the roofs of their 
sugar-loaf houses. They are readily seen, too, 
making short excursions into the meadows ; and 
occasionally the desire to rove and see the world 
will take such hold upon one as to drive him a 
mile from water, and he will slink along in the 
shadow of the fences and explore your dooryard 

T1031 



and premises. Frequently, in the late winter, I 
have followed their tracks on these night jour- 
neys through the snow between ponds more 
than a mile apart. 

But there is larger game abroad than musk- 
rats and possums. These October nights the 
quail are in covey, the mice are alive in the dry 
grass, and the foxes are abroad. Lying along 
the favorite run of Reynard, you may see him. 
There are many sections of the country where 
the rocks and mountains and wide areas of 
sterile pine -land still afford the foxes safe 
homes ; but in most localities Reynard is rapidly 
becoming a name, a creature of fables and folk- 
lore only. The rare sight of his clean, sharp 
track in the dust, or in the mud along the 
margin of the pond, adds flavor to a whole 
day's tramping • and the glimpse of one in the 
moonlight, trotting along a cow-path or lying 
low for Br'er Rabbit, is worth many nights of 
watching. 

I wish the game-laws could be amended to 
cover every wild animal left to us. In spite of 
laws they are destined to disappear ; but if the 
fox, weasel, mink, and skunk, the hawks and 

[104] 



owls, were protected as the quail and deer are, 
they might be preserved a long time to our 
meadows and woods. How irreparable the loss 
to our landscape is the extinction of the great 
golden eagle ! How much less of spirit, daring, 
courage, and life come to us since we no longer 
mark the majestic creature soaring among the 
clouds, the monarch of the skies ! A dreary 
world it will be out of doors when we can hear 
no more the scream of the hawks, can no 
longer find the tracks of the coon, nor follow 
a fox to den. We can well afford to part with 
a turnip, a chicken, and even with a suit of 
clothes, now and then, for the sake of this wild 
flavor to our fenced pastures and close-cut 
meadows. 

I ought to have named the crow in the list 
deserving protection. He steals. So did Fal- 
staff. But I should miss Falstaff had Shakspere 
left him out ; yet no more than I should miss 
the crow were he driven from the pines. They 
are both very human. Jim Crow is the humanest 
bird in feathers. The skunk I did include in 
the list. It was not by mistake. The skunk 
has a good and safe side to him, when we know 

[105] 










The glimpse of Reynard in the moonlight. 



how to approach him. The skunk wants a 
champion. Some one ought to spend an entire 
October moon with him and give us the better 
side of his character. If some one would take 
the trouble to get well acquainted with him at 
home, it might transpire that we have grievously 
abused and avoided him. 

There is promise of a future for the birds in 
their friendship for us and in our interest and 
sentiment for them. Everybody is interested in 
birds ; everybody loves them. There are bird- 
books and bird-books and bird-books— new vol- 
umes in every publisher's spring announcements. 
Every one with wood ways knows the songs and 
nests of the more common species. But this is 
not so with the four-footed animals. They are 
fewer, shyer, more difficult of study. Only a 
few of us are enthusiastic enough to back into a 
hole in a sand-bank and watch all night for the 
" beasts" with dear old Tarn Edwards. 

But such nights of watching, when every fallen 
leaf is a sentinel and every moonbeam a spy, will 
let us into some secrets about the ponds and fields 
that the sun, old and all-seeing as he is, will 
never know. Our eyes were made for daylight ; 

[107] 



but I think if the anatomists tried they might 
find the rudiments of a third, a night eye, behind 
the other two. From my boyhood I certainly 
have seen more things at night than the bright- 
est day ever knew of. If our eyes were intended 
for day use, our other senses seem to work best 
by night. Do we not take the deepest impres- 
sions when the plates of these sharpened senses 
are exposed in the dark? Even in moonlight 
our eyes are blundering things ; but our hearing, 
smell, and touch are so quickened by the alert- 
ness of night that, with a little training, the 
imagination quite takes the place of sight — a 
new sense, swift and vivid, that adds an excite- 
ment and freshness to the pleasure of out-of- 
door study, impossible to get through our two 
straightforward, honest day eyes. 

Albeit, let us stay at home and sleep when 
there is no moon ; and even when she climbs up '■ 
big and round and bright, there is no surety of 
a fruitful excursion before the frosts fall. In 
the summer the animals are worn with home 
cares and doubly wary for their young ; the grass 
is high, the trees dark, and the yielding green is 
silent under even so clumsy a crawler as the box- 

[108] 



turtle. But by October the hum of insects is 
stilled, the meadows are mown, the trees and 
bushes are getting bare, the moon pours in un- 
hindered, and the crisp leaves crackle and rustle 
under the softest-padded foot. 




[109] 



FEATHERED NEIGHBORS 





FEATHEEED NEIGHBOES 



THE electric cars run past my door, with a 
switch almost in front of the house. I can 
hear a car rumbling in the woods on the west, 
and another pounding through the valley on 
the east, till, shrieking, groaning, crunching, 
crashing, they dash into view, pause a moment 
on the switch, and thunder on to east and west 
till out of hearing. Then, for thirty minutes, a 
silence settles as deep as it lay here a century 
« [113] 



ago. Dogs bark - an anvil rings ; wagons rattle 
by - and children shout about the cross-roads. 
But these sounds have become the natural 
voices of the neighborhood— mother- tongues 
like the chat of the brook, the talk of the 
leaves, and the caw of the crows. And these 
voices, instead of disturbing, seem rather to lull 
the stillness. 

But the noise of the cars has hardly died 
away, and the quiet come, when a long, wild cry 
breaks in upon it. Yarup ! yarup ! yarup-up-up- 
up-up ! in quick succession sounds the call, fol- 
lowed instantly by a rapid, rolling beat that 
rings through the morning hush like a reveille 
with bugle and drum. 

It is the cry of the "nicker," the " high-hole." 
He is propped against a pole along the street 
railroad, nearly a quarter of a mile away. He 
has a hole in this pole, almost under the iron* 
arm that holds the polished, pulsing wire for the 
trolley. It is a new house, which the bird has 
been working at for more than a week, and it 
must be finished now, for this lusty call is an 
invitation to the warming. I shall go, and, 
between the passing of the cars, witness the 

[114] 



bowing, the squeaking, the palaver. A high- 
hole warming is the most utterly polite func- 
tion in birddom. 

Some of my friends were talking of birds, 
not long ago, when one of them turned to me 
and said hopelessly : 

a, T is -no use. We can't save them even if 
we do stop wearing them upon our hats. Civi- 
lization is bound to sweep them away. We 
shall be in a birdless world pretty soon, in spite 
of laws and Audubon societies." 

I made no reply, but, for an answer, led the 
way to the street and down the track to this 
pole which High-hole had appropriated. I 
pointed out his hole, and asked them to watch. 
Then I knocked. Instantly a red head ap- 
peared at the opening. High-hole was mad 
enough to eat us ; but he changed his mind, 
and, with a bored, testy flip, dived into the 
woods. He had served my purpose, however, 
for his red head sticking out of a hole in a 
street-railway pole was as a rising sun in the 
east of my friends' ornithological world. New 
light broke over this question of birds and 
men. The cars drive High-hole away ? Not so 

[115] 



long as cars run by overhead wires on wooden 
poles. 

High-hole is a civilized bird. Perhaps " do- 
mesticated " would better describe him ; though 
domesticated implies the purposeful effort of 
man to change character and habits, while the 
changes which have come over High-hole — and 
over most of the wild birds— are the result of 
High-hole's own free choosing. 

If we should let the birds have their way 
they would voluntarily fall into civilized, if 
not into domesticated, habits. They have no 
deep-seated hostility toward us ; they have not 
been the aggressors in the long, bitter war of 
extermination ; they have ever sued for peace. 
Instead of feeling an instinctive enmity, the 
birds are drawn toward us by the strongest of 
interests. If nature anywhere shows us her 
friendship, and her determination, against all: 
odds, to make that friendship strong, she shows 
it through the birds. The way they forgive 
and forget, their endless efforts at reconcilia- 
tion, and their sense of obligation, ought to 
shame us. They sing over every acre that we 
reclaim, as if we had saved it for them only ; 

[116] 



and in return they probe the lawns most dili- 
gently for worms, they girdle the apple-trees 
for grubs, and gallop over the whole wide sky 




I- 4 % 41 



"Ji 



" They probe the lawns most diligently for worms." 

for gnats and flies— squaring their account, if 
may be, for cherries, orchards, and chimneys. 

The very crows, in spite of certain well- 
founded fears, look upon a new farm — not upon 
the farmer, perhaps — as a godsend. In the cold 
and poverty of winter, not only the crows, but 
the jays, quails, buntings, and sparrows, help 
themselves, as by right, from our shocks and 
cribs. Summer and winter the birds find food 
so much more plentiful about the farm and vil- 
lage, find living in all respects so much easier 
and happier here than in remote, wild regions, 

[117] 




? 



If 



1 



0\ 



Even he loves a listener. 



that, as a whole, they have become a suburban 
people. 

But life is more than meat for the birds. 
There is a subtle yet real attraction for them 
in human society. They like its stir and 
change, its attention and admiration. The 
shyest and most modest of the birds pines for 
appreciation. The cardinal grosbeak, retiring 
as he is, cannot believe that he was born to 
blush unseen— to the tip of his beautiful crest. 
And the hermit-thrush, meditative, spiritual, 
and free as the heart of the swamp from world- 
liness — even he loves a listener, and would not 
waste his sweetness any longer on desert forest 
air. I do not know a single bird who does not 
prefer a wood with a wagon-road through it. 

My friends had smiled at such assertions be- 
fore their introduction to the bird in the pole. 
They knew just enough of woodpeckers to ex- 
pect High-hole to build in the woods, and, when 
driven from there, to disappear, to extinguish 
himself, rather than stoop to an existence with- 
in walls of hardly the dignity and privacy of 
a hitching-post. 

He is a proud bird and a wild bird, but a 

[119] 



practical, sensible bird withal. Strong of wing 
and mighty of voice, he was intended for a vig- 
orous, untamed life, and even yet there is the 
naked savage in his bound and his whoop. But 
electric cars have come, with smooth-barked 
poles, and these are better than rotten trees, 
despite the jangle and hum of wires and the 
racket of grinding wheels. Like the rest of us, 
he has not put off his savagery : he has simply 
put on civilization. Street cars are a conve- 
nience and a diversion. He has wings and 
wildest freedom any moment, and so, even 
though heavy timber skirts the track and 
shadows his pole, and though across the road 
opposite stands a house where there are chil- 
dren, dogs, and cats, nevertheless, High-hole 
follows his fancy, and instead of building back 
in the seclusion and safety of the woods, comes 
out to the street, the railroad, the children, and < 
the cats, and digs him a modern house in this 
sounding cedar pole. 

Perhaps it is imagination, but I think that I 
can actually see High-hole changing his wood 
ways for the ways of the village. He grows 
tamer and more trustful every summer. 

[120] 



A pair have their nest in a telegraph-pole 
near the school-house, where they are constantly 
mauled by the boys. I was passing one day 
when two youngsters rushed to the pole and 
dragged out the poor harassed hen for iny edi- 
fication. She was seized by one wing, and came 
out flapping, her feathers pulled and splintered. 
She had already lost all but two quills from her 
tail through previous exhibitions. I opened 
my hands, and she flew across the pasture to the 
top of a tree, and waited patiently till we went 




" She flew across the pasture." 

away. She then returned, knowing, appa- 
rently, that we were boys and a necessary evil 
of village life. 

[121] 



But this pole-life marks only half the dis- 
tance that these birds have come from the 
woods. 

One warm Sunday of a recent March, in the 
middle of my morning sermon, a ghostly rap- 
ping was heard through the meeting-house. I 
paused. Tap, tap, tap ! hollow and ominous it 
echoed. Every soul was awake in an instant. 
Was it a summons from— ? But two of the 
small boys grinned ; some one whispered 
"flicker"; and I gathered my ornithological 
wits together in time to save the pause and 
proceed with the service. 

After the people went home I found three 
flicker-holes in the latticework over the north 
windows. One of last year's tenants had got 
back that morning from the South, and had 
gone to work cleaning up and putting things 
to rights in his house, regardless of Sabbath 
and sermon. 

This approach of the flicker to domestic life 
and human fellowship is an almost universal 
movement among the birds. And no tendency 
anywhere in wild life is more striking. The 
four-footed animals are rapidly disappearing 

[122] 




'• Putting things to 
rights in his house.' 



before the banging car and spreading town, yet 
the birds welcome these encroachments and 
thrive on them. One never gets nsed to the 
contrast in the bird life of uninhabited places 
with that about human dwellings. Thoreau 
tells his wonder and disappointment at the 
dearth of birds in the Maine woods ; Burroughs 
reads about it, and goes off to the mountains, 
but has himself such an aggravated shock of 
the same surprise that he also writes about it. 
The few hawks and rarer wood species found in 
these wild places are shy and elusive. More 
and more, in spite of all they know of us, the 
birds choose our proximity over the wilderness. 
Indeed, the longer we live together, the less 
they fear and suspect us. 



II 



Using my home for a center, you may describe 
a circle of a quarter-mile radius and all the way 
round find that radius intersecting either a 
house, a dooryard, or an orchard. Yet within 
this small and settled area I found one summer 
thirty-six species of birds nesting. Can any 

[123] 




■ a 



ft 



rJ 



" A very ordinary New 
England ' corner. ' " 



cabin in the Adirondacks open its window to 
more voices— any square mile of solid, nnhacked 
forest on the globe show richer, gayer variety of 
bird life? 

The nightingale, the dodo, and the ivorybil! 
were not among these thirty-six. What then ? 
If one can live on an electric -car line, inside the 
borders of a fine city, have his church across the 
road, his blacksmith on the corner, his neigh- 
bors within easy call, and, with all this, have 
any thirty-six species of birds nesting within 
ear-shot, ought he to ache for the Archseopteryx, 
or rail at civilization as a destroyer I 

There is nothing remarkable about this bit of 
country. I could plant myself at the center of 
such a circle anywhere for miles around and 
find just as many birds. Perhaps the land is 
more rocky and hilly, the woods thicker, the 
gardens smaller here than is common elsewhere 
in eastern Massachusetts ; otherwise, aside from 
a gem of a pond, this is a very ordinary New 
England "corner." 

On the west side of my yard lies a cultivated 
field, beyond which stands an ancient apple 
orchard ; on the east the yard is hedged by a 

[125] 



tract of sprout-land which is watched over by a 
few large pines ; at the north,' behind the house 
and garden, runs a wall of chestnut and oak, 
which ten years ago would have been cut but 
for some fortunate legal complication. Such 
is the character of the whole neighborhood. 
Patches of wood and swamp, pastures, orchards, 
and gardens, cut in every direction by roads and 
paths, and crossed by one tiny stream— this is 
the circle of the thirty-six. 

Not one of these nests is beyond a stone's 
throw from a house. Seven of them, indeed, are 
in houses or barns, or in boxes placed about 
the dooryards ; sixteen of them are in orchard 
trees ; and the others are distributed along the 
roads, over the fields, and in the woods. 

Among the nearest of these feathered neigh- 
bors is a pair of bluebirds with a nest in one of 
the bird-boxes in the yard. The bluebirds are 
still untamed, building, as I have often found, in 
the wildest spots of the woods ; but seen about 
the house, there is something so reserved, so 
gentle and refined in their voice and manner as 
to shed an atmosphere of good breeding about 
the whole yard. What a contrast they are to 

[126] 




" They are the first to 
return in the spring." 



the English sparrows ! What a rebuke to city 
manners ! 

They are the first to return in the spring j the 
spring, rather, comes back with them. They 
are its wings. It could not come on any others. 
If it tried, say, the tanager's, would we believe 
and accept it? The bluebird is the only possi- 
ble interpreter of those first dark signs of 
March ; through him we have faith in the 
glint of the pussy-willows, in the half-thawed 
peep of the hylas, and in the northward flying 
of the geese. Except for his return, March 
would be the one month of all the twelve never 
looked at from the woods and waysides. He 
comes, else we should not know that the waters 
were falling, that a leaf could be plucked in all 
the bare, muddy world. 

Our feelings for the bluebird are much mixed. 
His feathers are not the attraction. He is 
bright, but on the whole rather plainly dressed. 
Nor is it altogether his voice that draws us $ 
the snowflakes could hardly melt into tones 
more mellow, nor flecks of the sky's April blue 
run into notes more limpid, yet the bluebird 
is no singer. The spell is in the spirit of the 

[128] 



bird. He is the soul of this somber season, 
voicing its sadness and hope. What other bird 
can take his place and fill his mission in the 
heavy, hopeful days of March ? We are in no 
mood for gaiety and show. Not until the 
morning stars quarrel together will the cat- bird 
or scarlet tanager herald the spring. The ir- 
reverent song of a cat-bird in the gray gloom 
of March would turn the spring back and draw 
the winter out of his uncovered grave. The 
bluebird comes and broods over this death and 
birth, until the old winter sleeps his long sleep, 
and the young spring wakes to her beautiful life. 

Within my house is another very human little 
bird — the chimney-swallow. Sharing our very 
firesides as he does, he surely ought to have a 
warm place in our hearts ; but where have I 
ever read one word expressing the affection for 
him that is universally shown the bluebird! 

I am thinking of our American swallow. We 
all know how Gilbert White loved his chimney- 
swallows — how he loved every creature that 
flew or crawled about the rectory. Was it an 
ancient tortoise in the garden 1 ? the sheep upon 
the downs! a brood of birds in the chimney? 

9 [ 129 1 



4ft 



\ 



rJ« 




Where the dams are hawking for flies. 



No matter. Let the creatures manifest never 
so slight a friendliness for him, let them claim 
never so little of his protection, and the good 
rector's heart went out toward them as it might 
toward children of his own. 

But the swallows were White's fondest care. 
He and his hirundines were inseparable. He 
thought of them, especially those of the chim- 
ney, as members of his household. One can de- 
tect almost a father's interest and joy in his 
notes upon these little birds. Listen to the 
parent in this bit about the young in Letter 
XVIII. They are just out of the chimney. 

"They play about near the place where the 
dams are hawking for flies ; and when a mouthful 
is collected, at a certain signal given, the dam and 
the nestling advance, rising toward each other, 
and meetiDg at an angle ; the young one all the 
while uttering such a little quick note of grati- 
tude and complacency that a person must have 
paid very little regard to the wonders of nature 
that has not often remarked this feat." 

Has anything been written about our swift 
showing as faithful and sympathetic observation 
as that? No. He comes and goes without any 

[131] 





one, like Gilbert White, being cheered by his 
twitter or interested in his doings. Perhaps it 
is because we have so many brighter, sweeter 
birds about us here ; or perhaps our chimneys 
are higher than those of Selborne Rectory; or 
maybe we have no Gilbert White over here. 

Of course we have no Gilbert White. We 
have not had time to produce one. The union 
of man and nature which yields the naturalist 
of Selborne is a process of time. Our soil and 
our sympathy are centuries savager than Eng- 
land's. We still look at our lands with the 
spirit of the ax j we are yet largely concerned 
with the contents of the gizzards of our birds. 
Shall the crows and cherry -birds be extermi- 
nated'? the sparrows transported? the owls and 
hawks put behind bars? Not until the col- 
lectors at Washington pronounce upon these 
first questions can we hope for a naturalist who 
will find White's wonders in the chimney- 
swallow. 

These little swifts are not as attractive as 
song-sparrows. They are sooty— worse than 
sooty sometimes ; their clothes are too tight for 
them ; and they are less musical than a small 

[132] 



boy with " clappers." Nevertheless I coulcl ill 
spare them from my family. They were the 
first birds I knew, my earliest home being so 
generous in its chimneys as to afford lodgings to 
several pairs of them. This summer they again 
share my fireside, squeaking, scratching, and 
thundering in the flue as they used to when, real 
goblins, they came scrambling down to peek and 
spy at me. I should miss them from the chim- 
ney as I should the song-sparrows from the 
meadow. They are above the grate, to be sure, 
while I am in front of it ; but we live in 
the same house, and there is only a wall be- 
tween us. 

If the chimney would be a dark, dead hole 
without the swifts, how empty the summer sky 
would be were they not skimming, darting, wig- 
gling across every bright hour of it ! They 
are tireless fliers, feeding, bathing, love-making, 
and even gathering the twigs for their nests on 
the wing, never alighting, in fact, after leavings 
the chimney until they return to it. They rest 
while flying. Every now and then you will see 
them throw their wings up over their heads till 
the tips almost touch, and, in twos or threes, 

[133] 



scale along to the time of their jolly, tuneless 
rattle. 

From May to September, is there a happier 
sight than a flock of chimney -swallows, just be- 
fore or just after a shower, whizzing about the 
tops of the corn or coursing over the river, like 
so many streaks of black lightning, ridding the 
atmosphere of its overcharge of gnats ! They 
cut across the rainbow and shoot into the rose- 
and pearl- washed sky, and drop — into the depths 
of a soot-clogged chimney ! 

These swallows used to build in caves and in 
clean, hollow trees ; now they nest only in 
chimneys. So far have they advanced in civili- 
zation since the landing of the Pilgrims ! 

Upon the beams in the top of the barn the 
brown-breasted, fork-tailed barn-swallows have 
made their mud nests for years. These birds 
are wholly domesticated. We cannot think of- 
them as wild. And what a place in our affec- 
tions they have won ! If it is the bluebirds 
that bring the spring, the barn-swallows fetch 
the summer. They take us back to the farm. 
We smell the hay, we see the cracks and knot- 
holes of light cutting through the fragrant 

[134] 



V v 








^ 



^ 



— 



'• They cut across 
the rainbow." 



gloom of the mows, we hear the munching 
horses and the summer rain upon the shingles, 
every time a barn-swallow slips past us. 

For grace of form and poetry of motion there 
is no rival for the barn-swallow. When on 
wing, where else, between the point of a beak 
and the tips of a tail, are there so many marvel- 
ous curves, such beautiful balance of parts ? On 
the wing, I say. Upon his feet he is as awk- 
ward as the latest Herreshoff yacht upon the 
stays. But he is the yacht of the air. Every 
line of him is drawn for racing. The narrow, 
wide-reaching wings and the long, forked tail 
are the perfection of lightness, swiftness, and 
power. A master designed him— saved every 
possible feather's weight, bent from stem to 
stern, and rigged him to outsail the very winds. 

From the barn to the orchard is no great 
journey ; but it is the distance between two - 
bird-lands. One must cross the Mississippi basin, 
the Rocky Mountains, or the Pacific Ocean to 
find a greater change in bird life than he finds 
in leaping the bars between the yard and the 
orchard. 

A bent, rheumatic, hoary old orchard is na- 

[136] 





X -~'-jL~ 



ture's smile in the agony of her civilization. 
Men may level the forests, clear the land and 
fence it ; but as long as they plant orchards, 
bird life, at least, will survive and prosper. 




From the barn to the orchard. 



Except for the warblers, one acre of apple- 
trees is richer in the variety of its birds than 
ten acres of woods. In the three unkempt, de- 
crepit orchards hereabout, I found the robin, 
chippy, orchard-oriole, cherry-bird, king-bird, 
crow-blackbird, bluebird, chebec, tree -swallow, 
nicker, downy woodpecker, screech-owl, yellow 
warbler, redstart, and great- crested flycatcher 
—all nesting as rightful heirs and proprietors. 

[138] 



This is no small share of the glory of the whole 
bird world. 

I ought not to name redstart as a regular occu- 
pant of the orchard. He belongs to the woods, 
and must be reckoned a visitor to the apple - 
trees, only an occasional builder, at best. The 
orchard is too open for him. He is an actor, 
and needs a leafy setting for his stage. In the 
woods, against a dense background of green, he 
can play butterfly with charming effect, can 
spread himself and flit about like an autumn 
leaf or some wandering bit of paradise life, 
with wings of the grove's richest orange light 
and its deepest shadow. 

When, however, he has a fancy for the or- 
chard, this dainty little warbler shows us what 
the wood-birds can do in the way of friendship 
and sociability. 

Across the road, in an apple-tree whose 
branches overhang a kitchen roof, built a pair 
of redstarts. No one discovered the birds till 
the young came ; then both parents were seen 
about the yard the whole day long. They were 
as much at home as the chickens, even more 
familiar. Having a leisure moment one day, 

[139] 




li Across the road, in an 
apple-tree, built a pair 
of redstarts." 



when a bicycle was being cleaned beneath the 
tree, the inquisitive pair dropped down, the 
female actually lighting upon the handle-bar to 
see how the dusting was done. On another oc- 
casion she attempted to settle upon the baby 
swinging nnder the tree in a hammock ; and 
agaiu, when I caught one of her own babies in 

[140] 



my hands, she came, bringing a worm, and, 
without the slightest fear of me, tried to feed 
it. Yet she was somewhat daunted by the trap 
in which her infant was struggling ; she would 
fan my hands with her wings, then withdraw, 
not able to muster quite enough courage to 
settle upon them. 

Xeither of these birds ever showed alarm at 
the people of the house. In fact, I never saw 
a redstart who seemed to know that we humans 
ought to be dreaded. These birds are now as 
innocent of suspicion as when they came up to 
Adam to be named. On two occasions, during 
severe summer storms, they have fluttered at 
my windows for shelter, and dried their feathers, 
as any way-worn traveler might, in safety be- 
neath my roof. 

From the window one morning I saw Che- 
bec, the least flycatcher, light upon the clothes- 
line. She teetered a moment, balancing her 
big head by her loosely jointed tail, then leaped 
lightly into the air. turned, — as only a flycatcher 
can, — and, diving close to the ground, gathered 
half the gray hairs of a dandelion into her 
beak, and darted off. I followed instantly, and 

[141] 



soon found her nest in one of the orchard trees. 
It was not quite finished ; and while the bird 
was gone for more of the dandelion down, I 
climbed up and seated myself within three feet 
of the nest. 

Back came Mrs. Chebec with a swoop, but, 
on seeing me, halted short of the nest. I was 
motionless. Hopping cautiously toward the 
nest, she took an anxious look inside ; finding 
nothing disturbed, she concluded that there was 
no evil in me, and so went on with her interest- 
ing work. It was a pretty sight. In a quiet, 
capable, womanly way she laid the lining in, 
making the nest, in her infinite mother-love, fit 
for eggs with shells of foam. 

The chebec is a finished architect. Better 
builders are few indeed. The humming-bird is 
slower, more painstaking, and excels Chebec in 
outside finish. But Chebec's nest is so deep, so . 
soft, so round and hollow ! There is the loveli- 
ness of pure curve in its walls. And small won- 
der ! She bends them about the beautiful mold 
of her own breast. Whenever she entered with 
the dandelion cotton, she went round and round 
these walls, before leaving, pressing them fondly 

[142] 



with her chin close against her breast. She 
could not make them sufficiently safe nor half 
lovely enough for the white, fragile treasures to 
be cradled there. 

Artists though they be, the chebecs, never- 
theless, are very tiresome birds. They think 
that they can sing— a sad, sorry, maddening 
mistake. Mr. Chapman says the day that song 
was distributed among the birds the chebecs sat 
on a back seat. Would they had been out 




" Gathered naif the gray hairs of a dandelion into her beak." 

catching flies ! In the chatter of the English 
sparrow, no matter how much I may resent his 

[143] 



impudence and swagger, there is something so 
bright and lively that I never find him really 
tiresome. But the chebecs come back very 
early in spring, and sit around for days and 
days, catching flies, and jerking their heads and 
calling, Chebec! chebec! chebec! till you wish their 
heads would snap off. 

In the tree next to the chebec's was a brood 
of robins. The crude nest was wedged care- 
lessly into the lowest fork of the tree, so that 
the cats and roving boys could help themselves 
without trouble. The mother sputtered and 
worried and scolded without let-up, trying to 
make good her foolishness in fixing upon such a 
site by abundance of anxiety and noise. 

The fussiest, least sensible mother among 
the birds is the robin. Any place for her nest 
but a safe one ! The number of young robins 
annually sacrificed to pure parental careless-^ 
ness is appalling. The female chooses the 
site for the home, and her ability for blunder- 
ing upon unattractive and exposed locations 
amounts to genius. She insists upon building 
on the sand. Usually the rain descends, the 
floods come, the winds blow, and there is a fall. 

[144] 




" In the tree next to the chebec's was a brood of robins. The crude 
nest was wedged carelessly into the lowest fork of the tree, so that 
the cats and roving boys could help themselves without trouble." 



10 



Here is a pair building upon a pile of boards 
under a cherry-tree j another pair plaster their 
nest to the rider of an old worm-fence ; while a 
third couple, abandoning the woods near by, 
plant theirs, against all remonstrance, upon 
the top of a step-ladder that the brickniakers 
use daily in their drying-sheds. 

It was the superlative stupidity of this robin 
that saved her family. The workmen at first 
knocked her nest off to the ground. She had 
plenty of clay at hand, however, and began her 
nest again, following the ladder as it moved 
about the shed. Such amazing persistence won, 
of course. Out of wonder, finally, the men gave 
the ladder over to her and stood aside till her 
family affairs were attended to. Everything^ 
was right in time. After infinite scolding, she 
at last came off in triumph, with her brood of 
four. 

A striking illustration of this growing alliance 
between us and the birds is the nest of the great- 
crested flycatcher in the orchard. Great- crest 
has almost become an orchard-bird. At heart 
he is, and ever will be, a bird of the wilds. He 
is not tame— does not want to be tame ; he is 

[146] 



bold, and the dangers and advantages of orchard 
life attract him. His moving into an apple 
orchard is no less a wonder than would be an 
Apache chief's settling in New York or Boston. 

Most observers still connt Great-crest among 
the wild and unreclaimed. Florence A. Mer- 
riam, speaking of his return in spring, says : 
"Not many days pass, however, before he is so 
taken up with domestic matters that his voice 
is rarely heard outside the woods" ; and in 
Stearns's "Birds" I find : "It does not court the 
society of man, but prefers to keep aloof in the 
depths of the forest, where it leads a wild, shy, 
and solitary life." This is not Great-crest as I 
know him. I have found many of his nests, 
and never one in any but orchard trees. Biding 
along a country road lately, I heard Great- 
crest's call far ahead of me. I soon spied 
him on the wires of a telegraph-pole. Under 
him was a pear-tree, and a hundred yards away 
a farm-house. In the pear-tree I found his 
nest — snake-skins and all. 

I disagree, too, with most descriptions of this 
bird's cry. The authors I have read seem never 
to have heard him on a quiet May morning 

[147] 




" I soon spied him on the 
wires of a telegraph-pole." 



across a fifty-acre field. His voice is " harsh 
and discordant" when sounded into one's very 
ears. The sweetest-toned organ would be dis- 
cordant to one inside the instrument. Give the 
bird the room he demands, — wide, early-morn- 
ing fields, — and listen. A single shout, almost 
human it seems, wild, weird, and penetrating,, 
yet clear and smooth as the blast of a bugle. 
One can never forget it, nor resist it ; for it 
thrills like a resurrection call — the last, long 
summons to the spring waking. This solitary 
note is often repeated, but is never so rapid 
nor so long drawn out as the call of the flicker. 

[148] 



Great-crest is a character, one of the most 
individual of all our birds. What other bird 
lines his nest with snake-skins? or hangs such 
gruesome things out for latch-strings? He has 
taken up his residence among us, but he has 
given us pretty plainly to understand that we 
need not call, else I mistake the hint in the 
scaly skin that dangles from his door. The 
strong personality of the bird is stamped even 
upon its eggs. Where are any to match them 
for curious, crazy coloring? The artist had 
purple inks, shading all the way from the deep- 
est chestnut- purple to the faintest lilac. With 
a sharp pen he scratched the shell from end to 
end with all his colors till it was covered, then 
finished it off with a few wild flourishes and 
crosswise scrawls. 

Like the birds of the orchards and buildings, 
the field-birds also are yielding to human influ- 
ences. We can almost say that we have an 
order of farm-birds, so many species seem to 
have become entirely dependent upon the pas- 
ture and grain-field. 

" Where did Bobolink disport himself before 
there were meadows in the North and rice- 

[149] 



fields in the South? Was he the same lithe, 
merry-hearted beau then as now!" I do not 
know. But I do know that, in the thirty and 
three years since Mr. Burroughs asked the ques- 
tion, Bobolink has lost none of his nimbleness, 
nor forgotten one bubbling, tinkling note of his 
song. Yet in his autumn journey South, from 
the day he reaches the ripe reeds of the Jersey 
marshes till he is lost in the wide rice-lands of 
Georgia, his passage is through a ceaseless, piti- 
less storm of lead. Dare he return to us in 
spring? and can he ever sing again? He will 
come if May comes — forgetting and forgiving, 
dressed in as gay a suit as ever, and just as full 
of song. 

There is no marvel of nature's making equal 
to the miracle of her temper toward man. How 
gladly she yields to his masterful dominion ! 
How sufferingly she waits for him to grow out 
of his spoiled, vicious childhood. The spirit of 
the bobolink ought to exorcise the savage out 
of us. It ought, and it does— slowly. 

We are trying, for instance, to cow the savage 
in us by law, to restrain it while the birds are 
breeding ; but we hardly succeed yet. The 

[ 150 ] 



mating season is scarcely over, the young not 
yet grown, when the gunners about me go into 
the fields with their dogs and locate every covey 
of quail, even counting the number of birds in 




li He will come if May comes." 

«ach. With the dawn of the first day of open 
season they are out, going from flock to flock, 
killing, till the last possible bird is in their 
bloody bags. 

One of the most pathetic of all the wordless 
cries of the out-of-doors is the covey-call of 
the female quail at night, trying to gather the 
scattered flock together after the dogs are called 
off and the hunters have gone home. 

[151] 



It was nearly dark one December afternoon, 
the snow ankle -deep and falling swiftly, when, 
crossing a wide field, I heard this call from a 
piece of spront-land ahead of me. Kneeling 
in the snow, I answered the whistle. Instantly 
came a reply. Back and forth we signaled till 
there was a whir of wings, and down in the soft 
snow within a few feet of me dropped the lonely, 
frightened quail. She was the only one left of a 
covey that the night before had roosted un- 





Within a few feet of me dropped the lonely frightened quail. 

[152] 



broken, snugly wedged, with their tails together, 
under a pile of brush. 

Sharing the fields with the quails are the 
meadow-larks. They scale along the grass, 
rarely rising higher than the cedars, flapping 
rapidly for a short distance, then sailing a little 
in a cautious, breath-held manner, as though 
wings were a new invention and just a trifle 
dangerous yet. On they go to a fence-stake, and 
land with many congratulatory flirts of wings 
and tail. Has anybody observed the feat? 
They look around. Yes ; here I sit,— a man on a 
fence across the field, — and the lark turns toward 
me and calls out : "Did you see me!" 

He would be the best-bred, most elegant of 
our birds, were it not for his self- consciousness. 
He is consumed with it. There is too much 
gold and jet on his breast. But, in spite of all 
this, the plain, rich back and wings, the slender 
legs, the long, delicate beak, the erect carriage, 
the important air, the sleek, refined appearance, 
compel us to put him down an aristocrat. 

In a closely cropped pasture near the house, 
in early June, I found the eggs of the night- 
hawk. There was no nest, of course : the eggs 

[153] 





" On they go to a fence-stake." 

lay upon the grass, and, for safety, had been left 
directly under the fence. The cows might not 
step on them here, but nothing prevented their 
crushing the fragile things with their noses. 

Lengthwise, upon one of the rails, slept the 
mother. She zigzagged off at my approach, daz- 
zled and uncertain in the white light of the 
noon, making no outcry nor stopping an instant 
to watch the fate of her eggs. She acted like a 
huge bat, slinking and dodging, out of her ele- 
ment in the light, and anxious to be hid. She 
did not seem like a creature that had a voice j 

[154] 



and the way she flew would make one think 
that she did not know the use of her wings. 
But what a circus flier she is at night ! and with 
what an uncanny noise she haunts the twilight ! 
She has made more hair stand on end. with 
her earthward plunge and its unearthly boom 
through the dusk, than all the owls together. It 
is a ghostly joke. And who would believe in 
the daylight that this limp, ragged lunip. dozing 
upon the fence or the kitchen roof, could play 
the spook so cleverly in the dark ? 



Ill 



Ox the 25th of April, before the trees were in 
leaf, I heard the first true wood-note of the 
spring. It came from the tall oaks beyond the 
garden. u Clear, clear, clear up!" it rang, pure, 
untamed, and quickening. The solitary vireo ! 
It was his whistle, inimitable, unmistakable ; and 
though I had not seen him since last July, I hur- 
ried out to the woods, sure he would greet me. 

Solitary is the largest, rarest, tainest, and 
sweetest-voiced of the vireos. I soon found him 
high in the tops of the trees : but I wanted him 

[155] 



nearer. He would not descend. So I chased 
him, stoning and mocking him even, till, at last, 
he came down to the bushes and showed me his 
big blue head, white eye-rings, wing-bars, and 
yellow-washed sides. 

He did more than show himself: he sang for 
me. Within ten feet of me, he began a quiet 
little warble of a tenderness and contentment I 



MP 




V^ 



f / 



" It was a love-song." 

never heard before. Such variety of notes, such 
sweetness of melody, such easy, unconscious ren- 
dering ! It was a love -song, but sung all to 
himself, for he knew that there was no gentle 
heart to listen this side of Virginia. He sang to 

[156] 



his own happy heart as pure and sweet a song 
as the very angels know. 

Solitary disappeared from that day. I con- 
cluded he had gone to heavier, wilder woods to 
nest. It was late in June that, passing through 
this brush-land, I saw hanging from an oak sap- 
ling, just above my head, a soft, yellowish basket. 
It was a vireo's nest ; but it was too large, too 
downy, too yellow for Ked-eye. There were no 
bunches of white spider-webs upon it, such as 
Eed-eye hangs all over his nest. I stepped aside 
for a better view, and had just caught the glint 
of a large, white-ringed eye peering over the 
nest's edge at me, when, off in the woods behind 
me, the noon hush was startled by Solitary's 
whistle— a round, pure, pearly note that broke 
the quiet as pearly teeth break through the smile 
of a beautiful face. He soon appeared, coming 
on, a tree at a time, looking and asking, in no 
hurry and in no alarm. When he reached the 
pine overhead, his mate left the nest to confer 
with him. They scolded me mildly while I 
climbed for a look at the four delicately spotted 
eggs ; but as soon as I lay down upon the ground, 
the mother, without fuss or fear, slipped into the 

[ 157 ] 



nest and cuddled down over the eggs till her 
head hardly showed above the rim. Had a few 
bushes been removed I could have seen the nest 
from my front door. 

Why do the wood-birds so persistently build 
their nests along the paths and roads? I said 
that even the hermit-thrush prefers a wood with 
a road through it. If he possibly can he will 
build along that road. And what one of the 
birds will not f Is it mere stupidity ? Is it curi- 
osity to see what goes on ? Is there some safety 
here from enemies worse than boys and cats and 
dogs ? Or is it that these birds take this chance 
for human fellowship ? If this last is the reason 
for their rejecting the deep tangles for limbs that 
overhang roads and tufts of grass in constantly 
traveled foot-paths, then they can be pardoned ; 
otherwise they are foolish— fatally foolish. 

The first black-and-white warbler's nest I ever, 
found was at the base of a clump of bushes in a 
narrow wood-path not ten feet from a highway. 
There were acres of bushes beyond, thick and 
pathless, all theirs to choose from. 

In the same piece of scrub-oak the summer 
after I found another black-and-white warbler's 

[158] 



nest. The loud talk of three of the birds at- 
tracted me. Two of them were together, and 
just mated, evidently 5 the third was a male, and 
just as plainly the luckless suitor. He was 
trying to start a quarrel between the young 
couple, doing his best to make the new bride 
break her vows. He flew just ahead of them, 
darting to the ground, scuttling under the brush, 
and calling out, " See here ! Come here ! Don't 
fool with him any longer ! I have the place 
for a nest ! " 

But the pair kept on together, chatting 
brightly as they ran up and down the trees and 
hunted under the fallen limbs and leaves for a 
home-site. The male led the way and found the 
places ; the female passed judgment. I followed 
them. 

Every spot the cock peeped into was the finest 
in the woods ; his enthusiasm was constant and 
unbounded. "Any place is heaven," he kept 
repeating, "any place, so long as I have you." 
But she was to do the housekeeping, and the 
ecstasies of the honeymoon were not to turn her 
head. She was house-hunting ; and, like every 
woman, at her best. She said "no," and "no," 

[ 159 ] 



and "no." I began to think they never would 
find the place 7 when the male darted far ahead 
and went out of sight beneath some low huckle- 
berry-bushes near a stone wall. This wall ran 
between the woods and a pasture ; and parallel 
with it, on the woods side, was a foot-path. 

Up came the little hen, and together they 
scratched about under the leaves. Suddenly the 
cock flew away and fetched a strip of chestnut 
bark. This he turned over to his wife. Then 
both birds flew out to the chestnut limbs for 
bark, and brought their strips back. The home 
was founded. 

It was the merest cavity, pushed into the dead 
leaves, with three shreds of bark for first timbers. 
In less than a week the structure was finished 
and furnished— with a tiny white egg thickly 
sprinkled with brown. I watched the spot daily, 
and finally saw the four young warblers safely, 
out into their new woods-world. But from the 
day the first egg was laid until the nestlings left 
I constantly expected to find everything crushed 
under the foot of some passer-by. 

When free from household cares the chickadee 
is the most sociable of the birds of the woods. 

[160] 




a* X 



11 



"But the pair kept on to- 
gether, chatting brightly." 



But he takes family matters seriously, aud with- 
draws so quietly to the unfrequented parts of the 
woods during nesting- time as to seem to have 
migrated. Yet of the four chickadees' nests 
found about the house, one was in a dead yellow 
birch in a bit of deep swamp, two others were in 
yellow birches along wood-roads, and the fourth 
was in a rotten fence -post by the main road, a 
long way from any trees. 

A workman while mending the fence discov- 
ered this last nest. The post crumbled in his 
hands as he tried to pull it down, revealing the 
nest of moss and rabbit hair, with its five brown - 
and- white eggs. He left the old post, propped 
it up with a sound one, and, mending the broken 
walls of the cavity the best he could, hurried 
along with his task, that the birds might return. 
They came back, found the wreckage of dust and 
chips covering the eggs, tried the flimsy walls— 
and went away. It was a desecrated home, nei- 
ther safe nor beautiful now ; so they forsook it. 

There is no eagle's nest in this collection of 
thirty-six. But if Mr. Burroughs is correct, 
there is the next thing to it— a humming-bird's 
nest ; three of them, indeed, one of which is 

[162] 



within a stone's throw 
of my door ! This one 
is in the oaks behind 
my garden, but the 
other two are even 
nearer to houses. One 
of these is upon the 
limb of a pear-tree. 
The tip of this limb 
rubs against a wood- 
shed connected with 
a dwelling. The third 
nest is in a large ap- 
ple orchard, in the 
tree nearest the house, 
and saddled upon that 
branch of the tree 
which reaches farthest 
toward the dwelling. 
So close is this nest 
that I can look out of 
the garret window 
directly into it. 

I believe that Eu- 
by-throat is so far do- 




■' In a dead yellow birch." 



[163] 




" So close I can look directly into it." 

• 

mesticated that be rejoices over every new flower- 
garden. There was nearly half an acre of gladi- 
oli in the neighborhood one summer, where all 
the humming-birds gathered from far and near. 
Here, for the only time in my life, I saw a, flock 
of humming-birds. I counted eight one day j 
and the gardener told me that he had often seen 
a dozen of them among the spikes. They 
squeaked like bats, and played— about as bullets 
might play. In fact, I think I dodged when they 
whizzed past me, as a soldier does the first time 
he is under fire. 

One of my friends had a cellar window abloom 

[164] 



with geraniums. A ruby-throat came often to 
this window. One day the mistress of the flowers 
caught the wee chap in her hands. He knew at 
once that she meant no harm and quietly sub- 
mitted. A few days later he returned and was 
captured again. He liked the honey, and evi- 
dently the fondling, too, for he came very regu- 
larly after that for the nectar and the lady's 
soft hands. 

The nest behind my garden is in the top of a 
tall, slender maple, with oaks and chestnuts sur- 
rounding and overshadowing it. Finding a nest 
like this is inspiration for the rest of life. The 
only feat comparable to it is the discovery of a 
bee-tree. Finding wild bees, I think, would be 
good training for one intending to hunt humming- 
birds' nests in the woods. But no one ever had 
such an intention. No one ever deliberately 
started into the woods a-saying, "Go to, now ; I '11 
find a humming-bird's nest in here ! " 

Humming-birds' nests are the gifts of the gods 
—rewards for patience and for gratitude because 
of commoner grants. My nests have invariably 
come this way, or, if you choose, by accident. 
The nearest I ever came to earning one was in 

[165] 



the case of this one in the maple. I caught a 
glimpse of a humming-bird flashing around the 
high limbs of a chestnut, so far up that she looked 
no bigger than a hornet. I suspected instantly 
that she was gathering lichens for a nest, and, as 
she darted off, I threw my eyes ahead of her 
across her path. It was just one chance in ten 
thousand if I even saw her speeding through the 
limbs and leaves, if I got the line of her flight, 
to say nothing of a clue to her nesting-place. It 
was little short of a miracle. I had tried many 
times before to do it, but this is the only time I 
ever succeeded : my line of vision fell directly 
upon the tiny builder as she dropped to her nest 
in the sapling. 

The structure was barely started. I might 
have stared at it with the strongest glass and 
never made it out a nest ; the sapling, too, was 
no thicker at the butt than my wrist, and I 
should not have dreamed of looking into its tall, 
spindling top for any kind of a nest. Further- 
more, as if to rob one of the last possibility of 
discovering it, a stray bud, two years before, had 
pushed through the bark of the limb about three 
inches behind ^where the nest was to be fixed, and 

[166] 



had grown, till now its leaves hung over the 
dainty house in an almost perfect canopy and 
screen. 

For three weeks the walls of this house were 
going up. Is it astonishing that, when finished, 
they looked like a growth of the limb, like part 
and parcel of the very tree? I made a daily 
visit to the sapling until the young birds flew 
away ; then I bent the tree to the ground and 
brought the nest home. It now hangs above my 
desk, its thick walls, its downy bed, its leafy 
canopy telling still of the little mother's un- 
wearied industry, of her infinite love and fore- 
sight. So faultlessly formed, so safely saddled to 
the limb, so exquisitely lichened into harmony 
with the green around, this tiniest nest speaks 
for all of the birds. How needless, how sorry, 
would be the loss of these beautiful neighbors of 
our copses and fields ! 



[167] 



MUS'RATTDs 



1 V 




: Uncle Jethro limbered his stiffened knees and 
went chuckling down the bank." 







"MUS'KATTIN"' 

NE November afternoon I found Uncle 
Jethro back of the woodshed, drawing a 
chalk -mark along the barrel of his old inusket, 
from the hammer to the sight. 

"What are you doing that for, Uncle Jeth? " 
I asked. 

" What fo' % Fo' nius'rats, boy." 

"Muskrats ! Do yon think they '11 walk up 
and toe that mark, while you knock 'em over 
with a stick % " 

"G'way fum yhere ! What I take yo' pos- 
sumin' des dozen winters fo', en yo' dunno 
how to sight a gun in de moon yit % I 's gwine 
mus'rattin' by de moon to-night, en I won't 
take yo' nohow." 

Of course he took me. We went out about 
nine o'clock, and entering the zigzag lane be- 
hind the barn, followed the cow-paths down to 
the pasture, then cut across the fields to Lup- 

[in] 



ton's Pond, the little wood-walled lake which 
falls over a dam into the wide meadows along 
Cohansey Creek. 

It is a wild, secluded spot, so removed that a 
pair of black ducks built their nest for several 
springs in the deep moss about the upper shore. 

It is shallow and deeply crusted over with 
lily-pads and pickerel-weed, except for a small 
area about the dam, where the water is deep 
and clear. There are many stumps in the 
upper end ; and here, in the shallows, built 
upon the hummocks or anchored to the sub- 
merged roots, are the muskrats' houses. 

The big moon was rising over the meadows 
as we tucked ourselves snugly out of sight in a 
clump of small cedars on the bank, within easy 
range of the dam and commanding a view of 
the whole pond. The domed houses of the 
muskrats — the village numbered six homes — < 
showed plainly as the moon came up j and 
when the full flood of light fell on the still sur- 
face of the pond, we could see the "roads" of 
the muskrats, like narrow channels, leading 
down through the pads to the open space about 
the dam. 

[172] 




" The big moon was rising over the meadows." 

A muskrat's domestic life is erratic. Some- 
times there will be a large village in the pond, 
and, again, an autumn will pass without a 
single new house being built. It may be 
that some of the old houses will be fitted up 
anew and occupied ; but I have known years 
when there was not a house in the pond. At 
no time do all of the muskrats build winter 
houses. The walls of the meadow ditches just 

[173] 



under the dam are honeycombed with subter- 
ranean passages, in which many of the musk- 
rats live the year round. Neither food nor 
weather, so far as I have found, influence them 
at all in the choice of their winter quarters. 
In low, wet meadows where there are no 




Section of muskrat's house. 

ditches, the muskrats, of course, live altogether 
in mud and reed houses above ground, for the 
water would flood the ordinary burrow. These 
structures are placed on the tussocks along a 
water-hole, so that the dwellers can dive out 
and escape under water when danger ap- 
proaches. But here in the tide-meadows, 
where the ditches are deep, the muskrats rear 
their families almost wholly in underground 

[174] 



rooms. It is only when winter comes, and 
family ties dissolve, that a few of the more 
sociable or more adventurous club together, 
come up to the pond, and while away the cold 
weather in these haystack lodges. 

These houses are very simple, but entirely 
adequate. If you will lift the top off an ordi- 
nary meadow lodge you will find a single room, 
with a bed in the middle, and at least one en- 
trance and one exit which are always closed to 
outsiders by water. 

The meadow lodge is built thus : The musk- 
rat first chooses a large tussock of sedge that 
stands well out of the water for his bedstead. 
Now, from a foundation below the water, thick 
walls of mud and grass are erected inclosing 
the tussock ; a thatch of excessive thickness is 
piled on ; the channels leading away from the 
doors are dug out if necessary 5 a bunch of 
soaking grass is brought in and made into a 
bed on the tussock— and the muskrat takes 
possession. 

The pond lodges at the head of Lupton's are 
made after this fashioD, only they are much 
larger, and instead of being raised about a tus- 

[175] 



sock of sedge, they are built upon, aud inclose, 
a part of a log or stump. 

This lodge life is surely a cozy, jolly way of 
passiug the winter. The possums are inclined 
to club together whenever they can find stumps 
that are roomy enough ; but the muskrats 
habitually live together through the winter. 
Here, in the single room of their house, one 
after another will come, until the walls can hold 
no more ; and, curling up after their night of 
foraging, they will spend the frigid days bliss- 
fully rolled into one warm ball of dreamful 
sleep. Let it blow and snow and freeze out- 
side ; there are six inches of mud-and-reed wall 
around them, and, wrapped deep in rich, warm 
fur, they hear nothing of the blizzard and care 
nothing for the cold. 

Nor are they prisoners of the cold here. The 
snow has drifted over their house till only a 
tiny mound appears ; the ice has sealed the 
pond and locked their home against the storm 
and desolation without : but the main roadway 
from the house is below the drifting snow, and 
they know where, among the stumps and but- 
ton-bushes, the warm-nosed watchers have kept 

[176] 



breathing-holes open. The ice -maker never 
finds their inner stair ; its secret door opens 
into deep, under-water paths, which run all 
over the bottom of the unfrozen pond- world. 



rt#ie 




" The snow has drifted over their house till only 
a tiny mound appears." 

Unless roused by the sharp thrust of a spear, 
the muskrats will sleep till nightfall. You 
may skate around the lodge and even sit down 
upon it without waking the sleepers : but plunge 
your polo-stick through the top, and you will 

[177] 



hear a smothered plunk, plunk, plunk, as one 
after another dives ont of bed into the water 
below. 

The moon climbed higher up the sky and the 
minutes ran on to ten o'clock. We waited. 
The night was calm and still, and the keen, 
alert air brought every movement of the wild 
life about us to our ears. The soft, cottony 
footfalls of a rabbit, hopping leisurely down the 
moonlit path, seemed not unlike the echoing 
steps on silent, sleeping streets, as some traveler 
passes beneath your window ; a wedge of wild 
geese honked far over our heads, holding their 
mysterious way to the South ; white-footed mice 
scurried among the dried leaves ; and our ears 
were so sharpened by the frosty air that we 
caught their thin, wiry squeaks. 

Presently there was a faint plash among the 
muskrat houses. The village was waking up. 
Uncle Jethro poked the long nose of his gun 
cautiously through the bushes, and watched. 
Soon there was a wake in one of the silvery 
roads, then a parting of waves, and stemming 
silently and evenly toward us, we saw the 
round, black head of a muskrat. 

[178] 



It was a pretty sight and a pretty shot ; but 
I would not have had the stillness and the 
moonlit picture spoiled by the blare of that 
murderous musket for the pelts of fifty musk- 
rats, and as the gun was coming to Uncle 
Jethro's shoulder, I slipped my hand under the 
lifted hammer. 

With just an audible grunt of impatience the 
old negro understood, — it was not the first good 
shot that my love of wild thiags had spoiled for 
him, — and the unsuspecting muskrat swam on to 
the dam. 

A plank had drifted against the bank, and 
upon this the little creature scrambled out, as 
dry as the cat at home under the roaring 
kitchen stove. Down another 
road came a second muskrat, 
and, swimming across the 
open water at the dam, 
joined the first-comer 
on the plank. They 
rubbed noses softly— the 

sweetest of all wild-animal greetings— and a 
moment afterward began to play together. 

They were out for a frolic, and the night was 
[179] 




" They rubbed 
noses." 




w 




" Two little brown creatures washing calamus." 



splendid. Keeping one eye open for owls, they 
threw off all other caution, and swam and dived 
and chased each other through the water, with 
all the fun of boys in swimming. 

On the bottom of the pond about the dam, in 
ten or twelve feet of water, was a bed of unios. 
I knew that they were there, for I had cut my 
feet upon them ; and the muskrats knew they 
were there, for they had had many a moonlight 
lunch of them. These mussels the muskrats 
reckon sweetmeats. They are hard to get, 
hard to crack, but worth all the cost. I was 
not surprised, then, when one of the muskrats 
sleekly disappeared beneath the surface, and 
came up directly with a mussel. 

There was a squabble on the plank, which 
ended in the other muskrat's diving for a mus- 
sel for himself. How they opened them I could 
not clearly make out, for the shells were almost 
concealed in their paws ; but judging from 
their actions and the appearance of other shells 
which they had opened, I should say that they 
first gnawed through the big hinge at the back, 
then pried open the valves, and ate out the 
contents. 

[181] 



Having finished this first course of big-neck 
clams, they were joined by a third muskrat, 
and, together, they filed over the bank and 
down into the meadow. Shortly two of them 
returned with great mouthfuls of the mud- 
bleached ends of calamus-blades. Then fol- 
lowed the washing. 

They dropped their loads upon the plank, 
took up the stalks, pulled the blades apart, and 
soused them up and down in the water, rubbing 
them with their paws until they were as clean 
and white as the whitest celery one ever ate. 
What a dainty picture ! Two little brown 
creatures, humped on the edge of a plank, 
washing calamus in moonlit water ! 

One might have taken them for half-grown 
coons as they sat there scrubbing and munching. 
Had the big barred owl, from the gum-swamp 
down the creek, come along then, he could 
easily have bobbed down upon them, and might 
almost have carried one away without the other 
knowing it, so all-absorbing was the calamus- 
washing. 

Muskrats, like coons, will wash what they 
eat, whether washing is needed or not. It is a 

[182] 



necessary preliminary to dinner— their right- 
eousness, the little Pharisees ! Judging from 
the washing disease which ailed two tame musk- 
rats that I knew, it is perfectly safe to say that 
had these found clean bread and butter upon 
the plank, instead of muddy calamus, they 
would have scoured it just the same. 

Before the two on the plank had finished 
their meal, the third muskrat returned, drag- 
ging his load of mud and roots to the scrubbing. 
He was just dipping into the water when there 
was a terrific explosion in my ears, a roar that 
echoed round and round the pond. As the 
smoke lifted, there were no washers upon the 
plank ; but over in the quiet water lloated 
three long, slender tails. 

"No man gwine stan' dat shot, boy, jis t' see 
a mus'rat wash hi' supper " ; and Uncle Jethro 
limbered his stiffened knees and went chuckling 
down the bank. 



[183] 



A STUDY i:N T BIED MORALS 




She melted away among the dark pines like a shadow. 



A STUDY IN" BIRD MORALS 

THE eternal distinctions of right and wrong 
npon which the moral law is based inhere 
even in the jelly of the anioeba. The Decalogne 
binds all the way down. In the course of a lit 
tie observation one must find how faithfully the 
animals, as a whole, keep the law, and how sadly,, 
at times, certain of them are wont to break it. 
To pass over such notorious cases as the cow- 
bird, cuckoo, turkey-buzzard, and crow, there is 
still cause for positive alarm, if the birds have 
souls, in the depraved habit of duplicity common 
among them. In a single short tramp, one June 
afternoon, no less than five different birds at- 
tempted to deceive me. The casuist may be able 
to justify all five of them ; for, no doubt, there are 
extremities when this breach of the law should 
not merit condemnation ; but even so, if in the 

[ 187 ] 



limits of one short walk five little innocents de- 
liberately act out the coolest of falsehoods, one 
cannot help wondering if it is not true that the 
whole creation needs redeeming. 

The first of these five was a yellow warbler. 
I was trying to look into her nest, which was 
placed in the top of a clump of alders in a 
muddy pasture, when she slipped out and flut- 
tered like an autumn leaf to the ground. She 
made no outcry, but wavered down to my feet 
with quivering wings, and dragged herself over 
the water and mud as if wounded. I paused to 
look at her, and, as long as I watched, she played 
her best to lure me. A black -snake would have 
struck at her instantly ; but I knew her woman's 
ways and turned again to the nest. As soon as 
she saw that her tears and prayers would not 
avail, she darted into the bushes near me and 
called me every wicked thing that she could , 
think of. I deserved it all, of course, though I 
was only curious to see her cradle and its hold- 
ings, which, had she been a human mother, she 
would have insisted on my stopping to see. 

On the way to Lupton's I climbed a sharp, 
pine-covered hill, where the needles were so 

[188] 



^p— 




slippery that I had to 
halt for a minute's rest 
at the top. The trees rose 
straight and close and 
slender, with scarcely a live 
branch reaching out nearer 
the ground than twenty feet. 
The roof of green shut out 
the light, and the matting of brown 
spread the ground so deep that only 
a few stunted blueberry-bushes, small 
ferns, and straying runners of ground- 

[189] 



'• She called me 

every wicked 

thing that she 

could think of." 



pine abode there. It was one of those cathe- 
dral-like clumps, a holy of holies of the woods, 
into whose dim silence the straggling bushes, 
briers, and other lowly forest folk dare not come, 
but fall upon their knees outside and worship. 

The birds, however, are not so reverent. I 
was scarcely stretched upon the needles when a 
slight movement overhead arrested my atten- 
tion. As I looked, a soft fluttering of wings 
brought a blue jay into the branches directly 
above me. There is nothing peculiar in finding 
a blue jay among the pines— they usually nest 
there. But there was something peculiar about 
this jay ; he moved so quietly, he appeared so 
entirely unconscious of me, though I knew that 
he saw me as plainly as I him. Then at his side 
alighted his mate, meeker and more modest 
than a chippy. 

What did it signify— these squawking, scold- 
ing, garrulous birds suddenly gone silent and 
trustful ? In the pines at this season one never 
gets nearer a jay than field-glass range— near 
enough to hear him dash away, screeching de- 
fiance. But here were these two gliding among 
the branches above my head as cautiously and 

[190] 





" It was one of 
those cathedral 
like clumps." 




"They were 
watching me. 



softly as cuckoos, searching apparently for grubs, 
yet keeping all the time to the one spot, not 
leaving for a moment to hunt among other 
trees. Round and round the same limbs they 
went, without once screaming or uttering so 
much as a word of that sweet, confiding talk 
which one hears when he spies on a pair of 
lovers or a newly wedded couple of these birds. 

[192] 



I became suspicious. All this meant something. 
They kept close together, and fluttered about, 
hanging from the twigs head down like chicka- 
dees, deliberately biting off bunches of needles, 
prying into the cones, and scaling off bits of 
bark, but finding nothing, nor even trying to 
find anything. 

At this juncture I chanced to move my feet. 
The birds stopped instantly ; but on my be- 
coming quiet they went on scattering the nee- 
dles and bark-chips again. Then I raised my 
glass. They paused just for a second, and con- 
tinued, though now I saw that their picking was 
all at random, hitting the limb or not as might 
be. They were not hunting grubs : they were 
watching me ; and more— they were keeping me 
watching them. 

It was a clever little ruse. But it was too 
good, too new, too unjaylike for my faith. 
There was a nest against one of these pines, as 
sure as it was June. And this fearless uncon- 
cern % this new and absorbing interest in grubs ? 
All assumed !— very genuinely assumed, indeed, 
and might have led me to do a dozen things 
other than looking for the nest, had I known a 

13 [193] 



little less of jays. It was heroic, too. They 
were calm and had all their wits about them. 
Outwardly they were indifferent to my presence 
and gave me not the slightest heed. But this 
was all show. Every instant they saw me ; and, 
while pretending not to know that I was near, 
they had come to intercept me, to attract my 
attention to themselves, and save their nest. 
And at how much cost ! To have looked within 
those calm little bosoms were to have seen two 
hearts as anxious and fearful as ever thumped 
parental breasts. 

If I had been deceived and led to waste my 
afternoon or to record something untrue of the 
blue jay, still, I think, these two birds could 
hardly have been condemned before the law. 
For did not their motive justify the deed? 

The blue jays are braggarts, full of noise, and 
almost without morals ; yet they have not seemed 
to me quite as bad as they used to, not quite 
the same blustering, quarrelsome, unmoral rene- 
gades, since these two showed me how they 
could conquer their instinctive fears and rise 
superior to everything common and cowardly 
by the power of their parental love. 

[194] 



I could not find the nest j so returning the 
next day, I crept under cover to the foot of the 
hill, and, ascending stealthily, saw the hen as she 
slipped from the home tree. She melted away 
among the dark pines like a shadow, but reap- 
peared immediately with her mate to head me 
off again. Not this time, however, for I had 
their secret. My eye was upon the nest. It 
was a loose, rough affair of coarse sticks, fixed 
upon two dead branches well up against a slen- 
der pine's trunk. I could see patches of light 
sky through it, it was such a botch. But where 
art failed nature perfected. I saw the sky 
through the bungled structure, but not the eggs. 
I had to climb to see them, for they were so 
washed with shadowy green that they blended 
perfectly with the color of the nest and the sub- 
dued light of the pines. 

After my adventure with the jays I had an 
interesting experience with a pair of tiny birds 
in the sand-bank on the north side of Lupton's 
Pond. 

The country immediately surrounding the 
pond is exceedingly varied and full of life. 
The high, level farm-lands break off into sand- 

[195] 



banks, which, in turn, spread into sweeping 
meadows that run out to the creek. The little 
pond lies between steep hills of chestnut-oak 
and pine, its upper waters being lost in a dense 
swamp of magnolia and alder, while over the 
dam at its foot there rushes a fall that echoes 
around the wooded hills and then goes purling 
among the elder and dog roses into the sullen 
tide-ditches of the meadow. Except the 
meadows and cultivated fields, everything is on 
a small scale, as if the place were made of the 
odds and ends, the left-over pieces in the making 
of the region round about. Such diversity of 
soils, such a medley of features, such profusion 
of life, in a territory of the same size I never saw 
elsewhere. At the boarding-school, near by, 
Lupton's Pond is known as " Paradise." 

On reaching the pond I went over to the 
sand-bank to look for a pair of kingfishers who: 
had nested there many years; but instead of 
them, I saw a pair of winter wrens fly sharply 
among the washed-out roots of a persimmon- 
tree which stood on the edge of the hill above. 
I instantly lost sight of one of the birds. The 
actions of the other were so self-conscious that I 

[196] 



stopped and watched — I had never found a 
winter wren's nest. In a moment the missing bird 
appeared and revealed the nest. It was large for 
the size of the builders, made of sticks, grass, and 
feathers, and was fixed among the black roots just 
below the green hilltop, and set into the sand far 
enough to leave a little of one side exposed. 

The wrens hurried away on my approach ; 
but when I retreated to the foot of the bank, 
they darted back to the nest, the hen entering 
without a pause, while the cock perched upon a 
root at the door and began a most extraordinary 
performance. 

He managed to put himself directly between 
me and the tiny portal, completely cutting off 
my view of the little brown wife inside the nest j 
then, spreading his wings, with tail up and head 
on one side, he fluttered and bobbed and wagged 
and poured out a volume of song that was pro- 
digious. It lifted him fairly off his feet. Had 
he suddenly gone up with a whizz, like a sky- 
rocket, and burst into a shower of bubbles, trills, 
runs, and wild, ecstatic warbles, I should have 
looked on with no more wonder. Such a song ! 
It was singing gone mad. 

[197] 



My head was on a level with him. I leaned 
forward nearer the bank. At this he went 
crazy with his efforts— into a fit, almost. I 
eannot have been mistaken : it was the first 
time that I had ever heard a bird sing when in 
terror ; bnt I had whistled my way past too 
many dogs and through too many graveyards 
at night to be deceived in the note of fear, and 
in the purpose of this song. That bit of a 
husband was scared almost out of his senses ; 
but there he stood, squarely between me and 
that precious nest and the more precious wife, 
guarding them from my evil eyes with every 
atom of his midget self. 

It was as fine an illustration of courage as I 
ever saw, a triumph of love and duty over fear 
—fear that perhaps we have no way to measure. 
And it was a triumph of wedded love at that j 
for there were no young, not even an egg in the* 
unfinished nest. It all happened in less than a 
minute. The female reappeared in an instant, 
satisfied that all was well with the nest, and both 
birds sped off and dropped among the briers. 

How would the casuist decide for so sweet, so 
big, so heroic a deception— or the attempt? 

[198] 



A little farther down the creek ; where the 
meadows meet the marsh, dwell the cousins of 




" A triumph of love and duty over fear." 

the winter wrens, the long-billed marsh-wrens. 
Here in the wide reaches of calamus and reeds, 
where the brackish tide comes in, the marsh- 
wrens build by hundreds. Their big, bulky 
nests are woven about a handful of young cala- 
mus-blades, or tied to a few long, stout sedge - 
stalks, and grow as the season grows. 

[199] 



The nests are made of coarse marsh-grass,— of 
the floatage often, — and are so long in the pro- 
cess of construction that, when completed, they 
are all speared through with the grass-blades, as 
with so many green bayonets. They are about 
the size of a large calabash, nearly round, thick- 
walled and heavy, with a small entrance, just 
under the roof, leading upward like a short 
stair to a deep, pocket-like cavity, at whose 
bottom lie the eggs, barely out of finger reach. 

I could hear the smothered racket of the 
singing wrens all about me in the dense growth, 
scoldings to my right, defiance to my left, dis- 
cussions of wives, grumblings of husbands, and 
singing of lovers everywhere, until the whole 
marsh seemed a- sputter and a-bubble with a 
gurgling tide of song like a river running in. 
Now and then, a wave, rising higher than its 
fellows, splashed up above the reeds and broke 
into song-spray, as an ecstasy lifted the wee 
brown performer out of the green. 

But these short dashes of the wrens into 
upper air, I have come to believe, are not en- 
tirely the flights of enraptured souls. Some- 
thing more than Mr. Chapman's "mine of 

[200] 



music bursts within them." Before they knew 
that I was uear I rarely saw one make this sing- 
ing dive into the air ; but as soon as they were 
acquainted with my presence they appeared on 
every hand. I had not gone fifty feet into 
their reedy domain when I began to catch a 
furious berating. The knives of the mowing- 
machine up in the meadow went no faster nor 
sharper than these unseen tongues in the reeds. 
Suddenly a bit of brown fury dashed into view 
near me, spattered the air thick with song- 
notes, and, as if veiled by this cloud of melody, 
it turned on its head and dived back, chatter- 
ing of all that was seen to the other furies in 
the reeds. 

Does any one believe that exhibition to be 
an explosion of pure song— the exaltation of 
unmixed joy? If ever the Ninth Command- 
ment was broken, it was broken here. 

This uncontrollable emotion, this shower of 
song, is but a cloak to the singer's fear and 
curiosity. He wants to know where I am and 
what I am about. I once knew a little dog 
who was so afraid of the dark that he would 
run barking all the way to the barn when put 

[201] 



out at night. So these little spies start up 
singing their biggest as a blind to their real 
feelings and purposes. 

The quail's broken wings and rushes of blood 
to the head during nesting-time have lost 
their lure even for the small boy ; yet they 
somehow still work on me. I involuntarily 
give my attention to this distress until too late 
to catch sight of the scurrying brood. I ima- 
gine, too, that the oldest and wisest of the foxes 
is still fooled by this make-believe, and will 
continue to be fooled to the end of time. 

A barren, stony hillside slopes gradually to 
the marsh where the wrens live. Here I was 
met by the fifth deceiver, a killdeer plover. 
The killdeer's crocodile tears are bigger and 
more touchingly genuine than even the quail's. 
And, besides all her tricks, she has a voice that 
fairly drips woe. 

The killdeer always builds in a worn-out, 
pebbly pasture or in a bare, unused field. Here 
among the stones she makes her nest by scrap- 
ing out a shallow cavity, into which she scratches 
a few bits of rotten wood and weed-stalks in 
sizes that would make good timber for a caddis- 

[202] 



^"?V 



/<' 







nm\ 



He wants to know where I am and what I am about.' 



worm's house. Instead of digging the cavity, 
she often hunts up two or three stones and a 
corn-butt, which happen to lie so that she can 
crowd in between them, and makes this shift 
serve her for a nest. 

Her eggs are one of the world's small wonders. 
They lie out in the open like so many of the 
pebbles about them— resembling the stones so 
perfectly that they are more often overlooked 
or crushed than discovered. The ground color 

[203] 



of the egg is that of the earth, and the mark- 
ings correspond marvelously to the size, shade, 
and distribution of the bits of wood beneath 
them in the nest. I know of no other instance 
of protective coloring among the birds so 
nearly perfect, unless it be the kill deer herself 
when playing her favorite trick of " invisible." 

She had seen me before I entered the reeds 
of the marsh-wrens. Squatting close over her 
eggs, she watched me silently, and seeing that I 
was approaching her nest on my way up the 
hill, she glided off and suddenly appeared at 
my feet. Where she came from I did not 
know. It was as if the earth had opened and 
let her out. I stopped. That was what she 
wanted. "You numskull, look at me and make 
a fool of yourself," she said by the light in her 
eye. I did exactly so. 

With her head outstretched and body close . 
to the ground, she slid like a ghost before me as 
I followed. Now she took form like a stone, 
now seemed to sink out of sight into the earth, 
reappearing only to vanish again into thin air. 
Thus she led me on, contriving to keep from 
beneath my feet, and always just out of reach, 

[204] 



till, seeing that my credulity and patience were 
failing, she broke silence for a desperate last 
act, and fell in a fit, screaming, Kill-dee, Mil-dee, 
Mil-dee! 

There she lay in the agony of death. I stooped 
to pick her up 5 but she happened to flutter a 
little — the death-spasm. I stepped forward to 
take her. Putting my hand down, I— ah! not 
dead yet ! Poor thing! She jerked just out 
of my hand— reflex action, no doubt. But now 
it is all over ; she is dead, and I bend to pick 
her up, when, springing like an arrow from my 
grasp, killdeer, ringing out her wail, goes swiftly 
flying across the hill. 

Fooled ! Yes ; but not altogether fooled, for 
I knew that it would turn out so. The im- 
postor ! But was n't it beautifully done 1 I 
shall never grow too wise to be duped. 

She has played me a trick, and now I will 
revenge myself and find her nest. I shall — 
perhaps. 




"In the agony of death." 

[205] 



EABBIT ROADS 





BABBIT EOADS 



IN your woods walks did you ever notice a 
little furrow or tunnel through the under- 
brush, a tiny roadway in the briers and huckle- 
berry-bushes? Did you ever try to follow this 
path to its beginning or end, wondering who 
traveled if? You have, doubtless. But the 
woods must be wild and the undergrowth thick 
and you must be as much at home among the 
trees as you are in your own dooryard, else this 
slight mark will make no impression upon you. 
14 [209] 



But enter any wild tract of wood or high 
swamp along the creek, and look sharp as you cut 
across the undergrowth. You will not go far 
before finding a narrow runway under your feet. 
It is about five inches wide, leading in no partic- 
ular direction, and is evidently made by cutting 
off the small stems of vines and bushes at an inch 
or more from the ground. The work looks as if 
it had been laid out by rule and done with a 
sharp knife, it is so regular and clean. 

This is a rabbit road. Follow it a few rods 
and you will find it crossed by another road, ex- 
actly similar. Take this new path now, and 
soon you are branching .off, turning, and joining 
other roads. You are in rabbit-land, traveling 
its highways— the most complicated and entan- 
gling system of thoroughfares that was ever con- 
structed. The individual roads are straight 
and plain enough, but at a glance one can 
see that the plan of the system is intended to 
bewilder and lead astray all who trespass here. 
Without a map and directions no one could 
hope to arrive at any definite point through 
such a snarl. 

There often comes along with the circus & 

[210] 



building called the " Moorish Maze/' over whose 
entrance is this invitation : 

COME IN AND GET LOST ! 

This is what one reads at the cross-roads in 
rabbit-land. There are finger-boards and mile- 
stones along the way ; but they point nowhere 
and mark no distances except to the rabbits. 

An animal's strong points usually supplement 
each other 5 its well-developed powers are in line 
with its needs and mode of life. So, by the very 
demands of his peculiar life, the beaver has be- 
come chief among all the animal engineers, his 
specialty being dams. He can make a good slide 
for logging, but of the construction of speedways 
he knows absolutely nothing. The rabbit, on 
the other hand, is a runner. He can swim if he 
is obliged to. His interests, however, lie mostly 
in his heels, and hence in his highways. So 
Bunny has become an expert road-maker. He 
cannot build a house, nor dig even a respectable 
den ; he is unable to climb, and his face is too 
flat for hole-gnawing : but turn him loose in a 
brambly, briery wilderness, and he will soon 
thread the trackless waste with a network of 

[211] 



roads, and lay it open to his nimble feet as the 
sky lies open to the swallow's wings. 

But how maddening these roads are to the 
dogs and foxes ! In the first place, they have a 
peculiar way of beginning nowhere in particular, 
and of vanishing all at once, in the same blind 




" Calamity is hot on his track." 



fashion. I am not sure that I ever found a satis- 
factory end to a rabbit's road— that is, a nest, at 
playground, or even a feeding-place. Old Ca- 
lamity, the hound, is always tormented and 
undone whenever she runs foul of a rabbit 
road. 

She will start Bunny in the open field, and trail 
away after him in full tongue as fast as her fat 

[212] 



bow-legs will carry her. The rabbit makes for 
the woods. Calamity is hot on his track, going 
down toward the creek. Suddenly she finds 
herself plunging along a rabbit road, breaking 
her way through by sheer force where the rabbit 
slipped along with perfect ease. She is following 
the path now rather than the scent, and, all at 
once, discovers that she is off the trail. She 
turns and goes back. Yes, here the rabbit made 
a sharp break to the right by a side -path ; the 
track is fresh and warm, and the old hound sings 
in her eager delight. On she goes with more 
haste, running the path again instead of the 
trail, and— there is no path ! It is gone. This 
bothers the old dog ; but her nose is keen and 
she has picked up the course again. Here it goes 
into another road. She gives tongue again, and 
rushes on, when— Wow ! she has plunged into a 
thick and thorny tangle of greenbrier. 

That is where the torment comes in. These 
roads have a habit of taking in the brier-patches. 
Calamity will go round a patch if she can ; she 
will work her way through if she must— but it is 
at the cost of bloody ears and a thousand smart- 
ing pricks. Bunny, meantime, is watching just 

[213] 



inside the next brier- patch, counting the digs of 
his clumsy pursuer. 

I suppose that this " blind alley " kind of road 
is due to the fact that the rabbits have no regu- 
lar homes. They make a nest for the young ; 
but they never have dens, like minks and coons. 
In New England they often live in holes and 
among the crannies of the stone walls ; and there, 
as far as I have seen, they rarely or never make 
roads. Farther south, where the winters are 
less severe, they dig no holes, for they prefer an 
open, even an exposed, bed to any sort of shelter. 

Shelters are dangerous. Bunny cannot back 
into a burrow and bare his teeth to his enemy ; 
he is not a fighter. He can run, and he knows 
it ; legs are his salvation, and he must have room 
to limber them. If he has to fight, then give 
him the open, not a hole ; for it is to be a kanga- 
roo kicking match, and a large ring is needed. „ 
He had as well surrender himself at once as to 
run into a hole that has only one opening. 

During the cold, snowy weather the rabbits 
usually leave the bare fields for the woods, 
though the older and wiser ones more frequently 
suffer the storms than risk the greater danger 

[214] 




"Bunny, meantime, is watching just inside the next brier-patch." 

of such a move. When pressed by hunger or 
hounded hard, they often take to a rail-pile, and 
sometimes they grow so bold as to seek hiding 
under a barn or house. One young buck lived 
all winter in the wood-pile of one of my neigh- 
bors, becoming so tame that he fed with the 
chickens. 

The nearest approach that a rabbit makes to 
a house is his "squat," or form. This is simply a 
sitting-place in the fields or along the woods, that 
he will change every time he is thoroughly fright- 
ened out of it. Undisturbed he will stay in this 

[215] 



squat for months at a time. Occasionally a rab- 
bit will have two or three squats located over his 
range, each one so placed that a wide view on 
every side may be had. If it is along the woods, 
then he sits facing the open fields, with his 
ears laid back toward the trees. He can hear as 
far as he can see, and his nose tells him who is 
coming up the wind sooner than either eyes or 
ears. 

It is cold, lonely living here in the winter. 
But everybody, except the mice and little birds, 
are enemies, his only friends being his wits 
and legs. In the long run, wits and legs are 
pretty safe insurance. "He who fights and runs 
away will live to fight another day," is Bunny's 
precept— and it works well ; he still thrives. 

The squat is a cold place. The sky is its roof, 
and its only protection is the tuft of grass, the 
stone, or the stump beside whicji it is placed. . 
Bunny may change to the lee or windward side, 
as suits him, during a storm j but usually he 
keeps his place and lies close to the ground, no 
matter how the wind blows, or how fiercely falls 
the rain and snow. I have frequently started 
them from their squats in bleak, wind-swept 

[216] 



fields, when the little brown things were com- 
pletely snowed under. 

There is great individuality among all animals, 
and though the rabbits look as much alike as 
peas, they are no exception to the rule. This 
personality is especially shown in their whimsical 
fancies for certain squats. Here, within sight of 
the house and the dog, an old rabbit took up her 
abode on a big, flat rail in the corner of the 
fence. Of course no hawk or owl could touch 
her here, for they dared not swoop between 
the rails ; the dog and cat could scent her, 
but she had already whipped the cat, and 
she had given Calamity so many long runs 
that the hound was weary of her. The strate- 
gic value of such a situation is plain : she was 
thus raised just above the level of the field and 1 
commanded every approach. Perhaps it was not 
whim, but wisdom, that led to this selection. 

I knew another, a dwarf rabbit, that always 
got into a bare or plowed field and squatted be- 
side a brown stone or clod of earth. Experience 
had taught him that he looked like a clod, and 
that no enemy ever plagued him when he lay 
low in the brown soil. 



[217] 





"The squat is a cold place. 



One summer I stumbled upon a squat close 
along the public road. Cart-loads of trash had 
been dumped there, and among the debris was a 
bottomless coal-scuttle. In the coal-scuttle a 
rabbit made his squat. Beiug open at both ends, 
it sheltered him beautifully from sun and rain. 
Here he sat, napping through the day, watching 
the interesting stream of passers-by, himself 
hidden by the rank weeds and grass. When dis- 
covered by a dog or boy, he tripped out of one 
of his open doors and led the intruder a useless 
run into the swamp. 

At one time my home was separated from the 
woods by only a clover-field. This clover-field 
was a favorite feeding-ground for the rabbits of 
the vicinity. Here, in the early evening, they 
would gather to feed and frolic ; and, not content 
with clover, they sometimes went into the garden 
for a dessert of growing corn and young cabbage. 

Take a moonlight night in autumn and hide 
in the edge of these woods. There is to be a rab- 
bit party in the clover-field. The grass has long 
been cut and the field is clean and shining j but 
still there is plenty to eat. The rabbits from 
both sides of the woods are coming. The full 

[218] 



moon rises above the trees, and the cottontails 
start over. Now, of course, they use the paths 
which they cut so carefully the longest possible 
way round. They hop leisurely along, stopping 
now and then to nibble the sassafras bark or to 
get a bite of wintergreen, even quitting the path, 
here and there, for a berry or a bunch of sweet 
wood-grass. 

"Stop a moment ; this won't do ! Here is a side- 
path where the briers have grown three inches 
since they were last cut oif. This path must be 
cleared out at once, 7 ' and the old buck falls to cut- 
ting. By the time he has finished the path a dozen 
rabbits have assembled in the clover-field. When 
he appears there is a thump, and all look up ; some 
one runs to greet the new-comer ; they touch 
whiskers and smell, then turn to their eating. 

The feast is finished, and the games are on. 
Four or five of the rabbits have come together 
for a turn at hop-skip-and-jump. And such hop- 
skip -and -jump ! They are professionals at this 
sport, every one of them. There is not a rabbit 
in the game that cannot leap five times higher 
than he can reach on his tiptoes, and hop a clean 
ten feet. 

[219] 




- ; * 




" The limp, lifeless one hanging over the neck of that fox." 



Over and over they go, bounding and bounc- 
ing, snapping from their marvelous hind legs as 
if shot from a spring-trap. It is the greatest 
jumping exhibition that you will ever see. To 
have such legs as these is the next best thing to 
having wings. 

Eight in the thick of the fun sounds a sharp 
thump ! thump ! Every rabbit "freezes." It is 
the stamp of an old buck, the call, Danger ! 
danger I He has heard a twig break in the woods, 
or has seen a soft, shadowy thing cross the moon. 

As motionless as stumps squat the rabbits, stiff 
with the tenseness of every ready muscle. They 
listen. But it was only a dropping nut or a rest- 
less bird j and the play continues. 

They are chasing each other over the grass in 
a game of tag. There go two, round and round, 
tagging and re-tagging, first one being ."it" and 
then the other. Their circle widens all the time 
and draws nearer to the woods. This time round 
they will touch the bush behind which we are 
watching. Here they come— there they go j 
they will leap the log yonder. Flash ! squeak ! 
scurry ! Not a rabbit in the field ! Yes ; one 
rabbit— the limp, lifeless one hanging over the 

[221] 



neck of that fox trotting off yonder in the 
shadows, along the border of the woods ! 

The picnic is over for this night, and it will be 
some time before the cottontails so far forget 
themselves as to play in this place again. 

It is small wonder that animals do not laugh. 
They have so little play. The savage seldom 
laughs, for he hunts and is hunted like a wild 
animal, and is allowed so scant opportunity to be 
off guard that he cannot develop the power to 
laugh. Much more is this true of the animals. 
From the day an animal is born 7 instinct and 
training are bent toward the circumvention of 
enemies. There is no time to play, no chance, 
no cause for laughter. 

The little brown rabbit has least reason of all 
to be glad. He is utterly inoffensive, the enemy 
of none, but the victim of many. Before he 
knows his mother he understands the meaning of 
Be ready ! Watch ! He drinks these words in 
with his milk. The winds whisper them ; the 
birds call them ; every leaf, every twig, every 
shadow and sound, says : Be ready ! Watch ! 
Life is but a series of escapes, little else than 
vigilance and flight. He must sleep with eyes 

[222] 



open, feed with ears up, move with muffled feet, 
and, at short stages, he must stop, rise on his 
long hind legs, and listen and look. If he ever 
forgets, if he pauses one moment for a wordless, 
noiseless game with his fellows, he dies. For 
safety's sake he lives alone ; but even a rabbit 
has fits of sociability, and gives way at times to 
his feelings. The owl and the fox know this, 
and they watch the open glades and field-edges. 
They must surprise him. 

The barred owl is quick at dodging, but Bunny 
is quicker. It is the owl's soft, shadow-silent 
wings that are dreaded. They spirit him 
through the dusk like a huge moth, wavering 
and aimless, with dangling dragon -claws. But 
his drop is swift and certain, and the grip of 
those loosely hanging legs is the very grip of 
death. There is no terror like the ghost-terror 
of the owl. 

The fox is feared ; but then, he is on legs, not 
wings, and there are telltale winds that fly be- 
fore him, far ahead, whispering, Fox, fox, fox ! 
The owl, remember, like the wind, has wings— 
wings that are faster than the wind's, and the 
latter cannot get ahead to tell of his coming. 

[223] 



Key iiar d is cunning. Bunny is fore -sighted, wide 
awake, and fleet of foot. Sometimes he is caught 
napping— so are we all ; but if in wits he is not 
always Reynard's equal, in speed he holds his 
own very well with his enemy. Reynard is 
nimble, but give the little cottontail a few feet 
handicap in a race for life, and he stands a fair 
chance of escape, especially in the summer woods. 

When the hounds are on his trail the rabbit 
saves his legs by outwitting his pursuers. He 
will win a long distance ahead of them, and be- 
fore they overtake him he will double on his 
track, approaching as near as he dare to the 
dogs, then leap far aside upon a log, into a stream, 
or among the bushes, and strike out in a new 
direction, gradually making back toward the 
starting-place. He rises on his haunches to listen, 
as he goes along, and before the dogs have again 
picked up the trail, he has perhaps had time to 
rest and lunch. 

If it were a matter of dogs only, life would be 
just full enough of excitement to be interesting. 
He can double, balk, and mix trails on them, and 
enjoy it. They are nothing to fool. But the 
gun ! Ah, that 's a foe which he cannot get up 

[224] 




" His drop is swift and certain. 



15 



with. He may double and confuse the dogs ; 
but as he comes back along a side-road, with 
them yelping far in the rear, he often hops right 
into a game-bag. 

To do justice to the intelligence of the dog, 
and to be truthful about the rabbit, it must be 
remembered that, in the chase, Bunny usually 
has the advantage of knowing the lay of the land. 
The short cuts, streams, logs, briers, and roads 
are all in mind before he takes a jump. The 
dog is often on strange ground. Free the rabbit 
for the hunt, as you do the fox, on unknown 
territory, and the dogs will soon take the fright- 
ened, bewildered little creature. 

There is no braver or more devoted mother 
in all the wilds than Molly Cottontail. She has 
a mother's cunning and a mother's resourceful- 
ness, also. But this is to be expected. If number 
of children count for experience, then, surely,. 
Molly ought to be resourceful. There are sea- 
sons when she will raise as many as three fam- 
ilies—and old-fashioned families for size, too. 
It is not uncommon to find ten young rabbits 
in a nest. Five times twins ! And all to be 
fed, washed, and kept covered up in bed toge- 

[226] 



ther ! But animal children, as a rule, behave 
better than human children, so we may not mea- 
sure the task of Mother Molly by any standard 
of our own. It is task enough, however, since 
you can scarcely count the creatures that eat 
young rabbits, nor the enemies that unwittingly 
destroy them. A heavy rain may drown them, 
cattle may crush them, mowing-machines may 
cut them to pieces, and boys who are starting 
menageries may carry them away to starve. 

Molly's mother- wit and craft are sufficient for 
most of these things. She picks out a sunny 
hillside among high grasses and bushes for the 
nest, so that the rain will flow oif and not flood 
it, and because that here the cows are not so 
likely to trample, nor the plow and mowing- 
machine to come. She must also have ready and 
hidden access to the nest, which the grass and 
bushes afford. 

She digs a little hollow in the sand about a foot 
deep and as big around as a duck's nest, lines it 
first with coarse grasses and leaves, then with a 
layer of finer grass, and fills the whole with 
warm, downy fur plucked from her own sides 
and breast. This nest, not being situated at the 

[227] 



end of an inaccessible burrow, like the tame 
rabbit's or woodchuck's, requires that all care be 
taken to conceal every sign of it. The raw sand 
that is thrown out is artfully covered with leaves 
and grass to blend with the surrounding ground ; 
and over the nest itself I have seen the old rabbit 
pull vines and leaves until the inquisitive, nosing 
skunk would have passed it by. 

Molly keeps the young ones in this bed for 
about two weeks, after which time, if frightened, 
they will take to their heels. They are exceed- 
ingly tender at this age and ought not to be 
allowed to run out. They do not know what a 
man is, and hardly understand what their hind 
legs are. I saw one that was at least a month 
old jump up before a mowing-machine and bolt 
across the field. It was his first real scare, and 
the first time that he had been called upon to 
test his legs. It was funny. He did n't know ■ 
how to use them. He made some tremendous 
leaps, and was so unused to the powerful spring 
in his hind feet that he turned several complete 
somersaults in the air. 

Molly feeds the family shortly after nightfall, 
and always tucks them in when leaving, with the 

[228] 



caution to lie quiet and still. She is not often 
surprised with her young, but lingers near on 
guard. You can easily tell if you are in the 
neighborhood of her nest by the way she thumps 
and watches you, and refuses to be driven off. 
Here she waits, and if anything smaller than a 
dog appears she rushes to meet it, stamping the 
ground in fury. A dog she will intercept by 
leaving a warm trail across his path, or, in case 
the brute has no nose for her scent, by throwing 
herself in front of him and drawing him off on a 
long chase. 

One day, as I was quietly picking wild straw- 
berries on a hill, I heard a curious grunting down 
the side below me, then the quick thud ! thud ! of 
an angry rabbit. Among the bushes I caught 
a glimpse of rabbit ears. A fight was on. 

Crouching beside a bluish spot, which I knew 
to be a rabbit's nest, was a big yellow cat. He 
had discovered the young ones, and was making 
mouths at the thought of how they would taste, 
when the mother's thump startled him. He 
squatted flat, with ears back, tail swelled, and 
hair standing up along his back, as the rabbit 
leaped over him. It was a glimpse of Molly's 

[229] 



ears, as she made the jump, that I had caught. 
It was the beginning of the bout— only a feint 
by the rabbit, just to try the mettle of her an- 
tagonist. 

The cat was scared, and before he got himself 
together, Molly, with a mighty bound, was in 
the air again, and, as she flashed over him, she 
fetched him a stunning whack on the head that 
knocked him endwise. He was on his feet in an 
instant, but just in time to receive a stinging 
blow on the ear that sent him sprawling several 
feet down the hill. The rabbit seemed constantly 
in the air. Back and forth, over and over the 
cat she flew, and with every bound landed a 
terrific kick with her powerful hind feet, that 
was followed by a puff of yellow fur. 

The cat could not stand up to this. Every 
particle of breath and fight was knocked out of 
him at about the third kick. The green light in 
his eyes was the light of terror. He got quickly 
to a bush, and ran away, else I believe that the 
old rabbit would have beaten him to death. 

The seven young ones in the nest were un- 
harmed. Molly grunted and stamped at me for 
looking at them ; but I was too big to kick as she 

[230] 




J^SSaw^STO'" 



" Seven young ones in the nest." 



had just kicked the cat, and I could not be led 
away to chase her, as she would have led a dog. 
The little fellows were nearly ready to leave the 
nest. A few weeks later, when the wheat was 
cut in the field above, one of the seven v^as killed 
by the long, fearful knife of the reaper. 

[231] 



Perhaps the other six survived until Novem- 
ber, the beginning of the gunning season. But 
when the slaughter was past, if one lived, he re- 
membered more than once the cry of the hounds, 
the crack of the gun, and the sting of shot. He 
has won a few months 7 respite from his human 
enemies ; but this is not peace. There is no 
peace for him. He may escape a long time yet ; 
but his foes are too many for him. He fights a 
good fight, but must lose at last. 



[232] 



BRICK-TOP 



BKICK-TOP 

THAT man was not only an item in the reck- 
oning when the world was made, bnt that 
his attributes were anticipated too, is every- 
where attested by the way nature makes use of 
his wreckage. She provides bountifully for his 
comfort, and, not content with this, she takes 
his refuse, his waste, what he has bungled and 
spoiled, and out of it fashions some of her rarest, 
daintiest delicacies. She gathers up his chips 
and cobs, his stubble and stumps,— the crumbs 
which fall from his table,— and brings them back 
to him as the perfection of her culinary art. 

So, at least, any one with an imagination and 
a cultivated taste will say after he has eaten 
that October titbit, the brick-top mushroom. 

The eating of mushrooms is a comparatively 
unappreciated privilege in our country. The 
taste is growing rapidly ; but we have such an 
abundance of more likely stuff to live upon that 

[235] 



the people have wisely abstained from a fungus 
diet. All things considered, it is a legitimate 
and wholesome horror, this wide -spread horror 
of toadstools. The woods, the wild fields, and 
the shaded roadsides gleam all through July and 
August with that pale, pretty "spring mush- 
room," the deadly Agaricus (Amanita) vermis; 
yet how seldom we hear of even a child being 
poisoned by eating it ! Surely it seems as if our 
fear of toadstools, like our hatred for snakes, has 
become an instinct. I have never known a mush- 
room enthusiast who had not first to conquer an 
almost mortal dread and to coax his backward 
courage and appetite by the gentlest doses. And 
this is well. An appetite for mushrooms is not 
wholly to be commended. Strangely enough, 
it is not the novice only who happens to suffer : 
the professional, the addicted eater, not infre- 
quently falls a victim. 

The risk the beginner runs is mainly from 
ignorance of the species. In gathering anything 
one naturally picks the fairest and most perfect. 
Now among the mushrooms the most beautiful, 
the ideal shapes are pretty sure to be of the 
poisonous Amanita tribe, whose toxic breath 

[236] 



throws any concentrated combination of arsenic, 
belladonna, and Paris green far into the shade. 
There is nothing morally wrong in the mushroom 
habit, yet for downright fatality it is eclipsed 
only by the opium habit and the suicidal taste 
for ballooning. 

There are good people, nevertheless, who will 
eat mushrooms— toadstools even, if you please. 
The large cities have their mycological socie- 
ties in spite of muscarine and phallin, as they 
have kennel clubs in spite of hydrophobia. 
Therefore, let us take the frontispiece of skull 
and crossbones, which Mr. Gibson thoughtfully 
placed in his poetic book on toadstools, for the 
centerpiece of our table, bring on the broiled 
brick-tops, and insist that, as for us, we Mow 
these to be the very ambrosia of the gods. 

The development of a genuine enthusiasm for 
mushrooms— for anything, in fact— is worth the 
risk. Eating is not usually a stimulus to the 
imagination ; but one cannot eat mushrooms in 
any other than an ecstatic frame of mind. If it 
chances to be your first meal of brick-tops (you 
come to the task with the latest antidote at 
hand), there is a stirring of the soul utterly im- 

[237] 



possible in the eating of a prosaic potato. You 
are on the verge all the time of discovery— of 
quail on toast, oysters, beefsteak, macaroni, 
caviar, or liver, according to your nationality, 
native fancy, and mycological intensity. 
The variety of meats, flavors, and wholesome 
nutrients found in mushrooms by the average 
mycologist beggars all the tales told by breakfast- 
food manufacturers. After listening to a warm 
mycologist one feels as Caleb felt at sight of the 
grapes and pomegranates : the children of Anak 
may be there, but this land of the mushroom is 
the land of milk and honey ; let us go up at 
once and possess it. 

If eating mushrooms quickens the fancy, the 
gathering of them sharpens the eye and trains 
the mind to a scientific accuracy in detail that 
quite balances any tendency toward a gustato- 
poetic extravagance. When one's life, when so • 
slight a matter as one's dinner, depends upon the 
nicest distinctions in stem, gills, color, and age, 
even a Yankee will cease guessing and make a 
desperate effort to know what he is about. 

Here is where brick-top commends itself over 
many other species of mushroom that approach 

[238] 




•' The land of the mushroom." 



the shape of the deadly Amanita. It is umbrella- 
shaped, moderately long-stemmed, regularly 
gilled, and without a "cup" or bulge at the 
root, rather pointed instead. It is a rich brick- 
brown or red at the center of the cap, shading 
off lighter toward the circumference. The gills 
in fresh young specimens are a light drab, turn- 
ing black later with the black spores. It comes 
in September, and lasts until the heavy snows 
fall, growing rarely anywhere but in the woods 
upon oak stumps. I have found a few scattering 
individuals among the trees, and I took two out 
of my lawn one autumn. But oak-trees had 
stood in the lawn until a few years before, and 
enough of their roots still remained to furnish 
a host for the mushrooms. A stump sometimes 
will be covered with them, cap over cap, tier 
crowding tier so closely that no particle of the 
stump is seen. This colony life is characteristic. 
I have more than once gathered half a peck of 
edible specimens from a single stump. 

The most inexperienced collector, when brick- 
top has been pointed out to him, can hardly take 
any other mushroom by mistake. It is strange, 
however, that this delicious, abundant, and per- 

[240] 



fectly harmless species should be so seldom pic- 
tured among the edible fungi in works upon this 
subject. I have seen it figured only two or three 
times, under the names Hypholoma perplexum 
and H. sublateritius, with the mere mention that 
it was safe to eat. Yet its season is one of the 
longest, and it is so abundant and so widely dis- 
tributed as to make the gathering of the more 
commonly known but really rarer species quite 
impractical. 

No one need fear brick-tops. When taken 
young and clean, if they do not broil into squab 
or fry into frogs' legs, they will prove, at any 
rate, to be deliciously tender, woodsy sweetmeats, 
good to eat and a joy to collect. 

And the collecting of mushrooms is, after 
all, their real value. Our stomachs are too much 
with us. It is well enough to beguile ourselves 
with large talk of rare flavors, high per cents, of 
proteids, and small butcher's bills ; but it is mostly 
talk. It gives a practical, businesslike com- 
plexion to our interest and excursions ; it backs 
up our accusing consciences at the silly waste of 
time with a show of thrift and economy ; but 
here mushroom economy ends. There is about 
!6 [241] 



as much in it as there is of cheese in the moon. 
No doubt tons and tons of this vegetable 
meat go to waste every day in the woods and 
fields, just as the mycologists say ; nevertheless, 
according to my experience, it is safer and 
cheaper to board at a first-class hotel than in 
the wilderness upon this manna, bounty of the 
skies though it be. 

It is the hunt for mushrooms, the introduction 
through their door into a new and wondrous 
room of the out-of-doors, that makes mycology 
worthy and moral. The genuine lover of the 
out-of-doors, having filled his basket with fungi, 
always forces his day's gleanings upon the least 
resisting member of the party before he reaches 
home, while he himself feeds upon the excitement 
of the hunt, the happy mental rest, the sunshine 
of the fields, and the flavor of the woods. After 
a spring with the birds and a summer with the 
flowers, to leave glass and botany-can at home 
and go tramping through the autumn after mush- 
rooms is to catch the most exhilarating breath of 
the year, is to walk of a sudden into a wonder- 
world. With an eye single for fungi, we see them 
of every shape and color and in every imaginable 

[242] 



place— under leaves, up trees, in cellars, every- 
where we turn. Kings of oreads dance for us 
upon the lawns, goblins clamber over the rotting 
stumps, and dryads start from the hollow trees 
to spy as we pass along. 

Brick-top is in its prime throughout October 
—when, in the dearth of other interests, we need 
it most. By this time there are few of the birds 
and flowers left, though the woods are far from 
destitute of sound and color. The chickadees 
were never friendlier ; and when, since last au- 
tumn, have so many flocks of goldfinches glit- 
tered along our paths ? Some of the late asters 
and goldenrods are still in bloom, and here and 
there a lagging joepye-weed, a hoary head of 
boneset, and a brilliant tuft of ironweed show 
above the stretches of brown. 

October is not the month of flowers, even if it 
does claim the witch-hazel for its own. It is the 
month of mushrooms. There is something un- 
natural and uncanny about the witch-hazel, 
blossoming with sear leaf and limbs half bare. 
I never come upon it without a start. The 
sedges are dead, the maples leafless, the robins 
gone, the muskrats starting their winter lodges ; 

[243] 




m" *& 



r 



Witch-hazel. 



and here, in the yellow autumn sun, straggles 
this witch-hazel, naked like the willows and 
alders, but spangled thick with yellow blossoms ! 
Blossoms, indeed, but not flowers. Hydras they 
look like, from the dying lily-pads, crawling over 
the bush to yellow and die with the rest of the 
dying world. 

No natural, well-ordered plant ought to be in 
flower when its leaves are falling ; but if stumps 
and dead trees are to blossom, of course leaf-fall- 
ing time would seem a proper enough season. 
And what can we call it but blossoming, when an 
old oak-stump, dead and rotten these ten years, 
wakes up after a soaking rain, some October 
morning, a very mound of delicate, glistening, 
brick-red mushrooms'? It is as great a wonder 
and quite as beautiful a mystery as the bursting 
into flower of the marsh-marigolds in May. But 
no deeper mystery, for— " dead," did I call 
these stumps'? Kotten they may be, but not 
dead. There is nothing dead out of doors. 
There is change and decay in all things ; but if 
birds and bugs, if mosses and mushrooms, can 
give life, then the deadest tree in the woods is 
the very fullest of life. 

[245] 



SECOND CKOPS 




SECOND CROPS 



TAKE it the year round, the deadest trees in 
the woods are the livest and fullest of fruit 
—for the naturalist. Dr. Holmes had a passion 
for big trees 5 the camera- carriers hunt up his- 
toric trees ; boys with deep pockets take to fruit- 
trees : but dead trees, since I developed a curios- 
ity for dark holes, have yielded me the most and 
largest crops. 

An ardor for decayed trees is not from any 
perversity of nature. There is nothing unrea- 

[249] 



sonable in it, as in— bibliomania, for instance. 
I discover a gaunt, pnnky old pine, bored full of 
holes, and standing among acres of green, char- 
acterless companions, with the held breath, the 
jumping pulse, the bulging eyes of a collector 
stumbling upon a Caxton in a latest-publication 
book-store. But my excitement is really with 
some cause ; for— sh ! look ! In that round 
hole up there, just uuder the broken limb, the 
flame of the red-headed woodpecker— a light in 
one of the windows of the woods. Peep through 
it. What rooms ! What people ! No ; I never 
paid ten cents extra for a volume because it was 
full of years and mildew and rare errata (I some- 
times buy books at a reduction for these acci- 
dents) ; but I have walked miles, and passed 
forests of green, good-looking trees, to wait in 
the slim shade of some tottering, limbless old 
stump. 

Within the reach of my landscape four of these 
ancient derelicts hold their stark arms against 
the horizon, while every wood-path, pasture- 
lane, and meadow-road leads past hollow apples, 
gums, or chestnuts, where there are sure to be 
happenings as the seasons come and go. Sooner 

[250] 



or later, every dead tree in the neighborhood 
finds a place in my note-book. They are all 
named and mentioned, some over and over,— my 
list of Immortals,— all very dead or very hollow, 
ranging from a big sweet-gum in the swamp 
along the creek to an old pnmp-tree, stnck for a 
post within fifty feet of my window. The gum 
is the hollowest, the pump the deadest, tree of 
the lot. 

The nozle-hole of the one-time pump stares 
hard at my study window like the empty socket 
of a Cyclops. There is a small bird-house nailed 
just above the window, which gazes back with its 
single eye at the staring pump. For some time 
one April the sputtering sparrows held this box 
above the window against the attacks of two tree- 
swallows. The sparrows had been on the ground 
all winter, and had staked their claim with a nest 
that had already outgrown the house when the 
swallows arrived. In love of fair play, and re- 
membering more than one winter day made alive 
and cheerful by the sparrows, I could not inter- 
fere and oust them, though it grieved me to lose 
the pretty pair of swallows as summer neighbors. 

The swallows disappeared. All was quiet for 

[251] 




-U^ 





" I knew it suited 
exactly." 



a few days, when, one morning, I saw the flutter 
of steel-blue wings at the hole in the pump, and 
there, propped hard with his tail over the hole, 
hung my tree-swallow. I should have that pair 
as tenants yet, and in a house where I could 
see everything they did. He peered quickly 
around, then peeped cautiously into the opening, 
and slipped out of sight through the dark, round 
hole. 

[252] 



I knew it suited exactly by the glad, excited 
way he came out and darted off. He soon re- 
turned with the little shining wife ; and through 
a whole week there was a constant passing of 
blue backs and white breasts as the joyous pair 
fitted up the inside of that pump with grass and 
feathers fit for the cradle of a fairy queen. 

By the rarest fortune I was on hand when one 
of the sparrows discovered what had happened 
in the pump. There is not a single microbe of 
Anglophobia in my system. But need one's love 
for things English include this pestiferous spar- 
row? Anyhow, I feel just a mite of satisfaction 
when I recall how that sparrow, with the colo- 
nizing instinct of his race, dropping down upon 
the pump with the notion that he " had a duty 
to the world," dropped off that pump straight- 
way, concluding that his "duty" did not relate 
to that particular pump any longer. The spar- 
rows had built everywhere about the place, but 
that that pump— a post, and a post to a pair of 
bars at that— was worth settling had not dawned 
on them. When they saw that the swallows had 
taken it, one of them lighted there instantly, 
with tail up, head cocked, very much amazed, and 

[253] 



commenting vo- 
looked into the 
possible point, 
to enter, when 
whizz of wings, 
and a slap that 
ning. When the 
low swooped 
boomerang, the 
scuttled off to 

That was a 
Peace reigned 
along in July 
eggs had found 
skimming about 
or counting and 
selves demurely 
upon the wire 

Between two 
seen from the 
dow, stands a 
pathetically dis- 




ciferously. He 
hole from every 
and was about 
there came a 
a flash of blue, 
sent him spin- 
indignant swal- 
back, like a 
sparrow had 
an apple-tree. 
coup de grace. 
after that ; and 
the five white 
wings and were 
the fly-filled air 
preening them- 
in a solemn row 
fence. 

pastures, easily 
same study win- 
wild apple-tree, 
eased and rheu- 



" With tail up, head 
cocked, very much 
amazed, and com- 
menting vocifer- 
ously." 

matic, which, like one of Mr. Burroughs's trees, 
never bore very good crops of apples, but 
four seasons a year is marvelously full of 

[254] 



animals. It is chiefly noted for a strange 
collection I once took out of its maw-like 
cavity. 

It was a keen January morning, and I stopped 
at the tree, as usual, and thumped. No lodgers 
there that day, it seemed. I mounted the rail 
fence and looked in. Darkness. No ; there at 
the bottom was a patch of gray, and— I pulled 
out a snapping, blinking screech-owl. Down 
went my hand again, and a second owl came 
blinking to the light— this one in rich brown 
plumage. When I turned him up, his clenched 
claws held fistfuls of possum hair. Once more 
I pushed my hand down the hole, gingerly, and 
up to the shoulder. No mistake. Mr. Possum 
was in there, and after a little manoeuvering I 
seized him by the collar, and out he came grin- 
ning, hissing, and winking at the hard, white 
winter day. 

And how exactly like a possum ! " There is a 
time for all things," comes near an incarnation 
in him. There is a time for eating owls— at 
night, of course, if owls can then be had. But 
day is the time to sleep ; and if owls want to 
share his bed and roost upon him, all right. He 

[255] 



will sleep on till nightfall, in spite of owls. And 
he would sleep on here till dusk, in spite of my 
rude awakening, if I gave him leave. I dropped 
him back to the bottom of the hole, then put the 
two owls back upon him, and went my way, 
knowing I should find the three still sleeping on 
my return. And it was so. The owls were just 
as surprised and just as sleepy when I disturbed 
them the second time that day. I left them to 
finish their nap. But the possum was served for 
dinner the following evening— for this, too, is 
strictly in accord with his time-for-all-things 
philosophy. 

This pair of owls were most persistent in their 
attachment to the apple-tree. Several times in 
the course of the winter I found them sleeping 
soundly in this same deep cavity, making their 
winter lodgings in the bent, tumble-down shanty 
which, standing not far from the woods and be- 
tween the uplands and meadows, has been home, 
hotel, post-office, city of refuge, and lookout for 
many of the wild folk about the fields. 

A worn-out, gone-to-holes orchard is a very 
city of hollows-loving animals. Not far away is 
one such orchard with a side bordering an 

[256] 



extensive copse. Where the orchard and copse 
meet is an apple-tree that has been the ancestral 



y 




AV 



" In a solemn row upon the wire fence." 



home of unnumbered generations of flying-squir- 
rels. The cavity was first hollowed out by 
flickers. The squirrels were interlopers. When 
17 [257] 




the young come in 
April the large opening 
is stuffed with shredded 
chestnut bark, leaving 
barely room enough 
for the parents to 
squeeze through. The 
sharpest-eyed hawk 
awing would never 
dream of waiting out- 
side that insignificant 
door for a meal of 
squirrel. 

But such precau- 
tions are not always 
proof against boys. I 
robbed that home one 
spring of its entire 
batch of babies (no 
one with any love of 
w T ild things could resist 
the temptation to kid- 
nap young fLying-squirrels) ? and tried 
to bring them up in domestic ways. 
But somehow I never succeeded with 

[258] 




" Young flying- 
squirrels." 



pets. Something always happened. One of 
these four squirrels was rocked on, a second 
was squeezed in a door, a third fell before he 
could fly, and the fourth I took to college with 
me. He had perfect liberty, for I had no other 
room-mate. I set aside one hour a day to 
putting corks, pens, photographs, and knives 
back in their places, for him to tuck away the 
next day in one of my shoes or under my pil- 
low. More than once I have awakened to find 
him curled up in my neck or up my sleeve, 
the dearest little bedfellow alive. But it was 
three stories from my window to the street ; and 
one day he tried his wings. They were not 
equal to the flight. Since then I have left my 
wild pets in the woods. 

If one wants to know what birds are about, 
especially the larger, more cautious species, let 
him get under cover near a tall dead oak or 
walnut, standing alone in the middle of open 
fields. Such a tree is the natural rest and look- 
out for every passer. Here come the hawks to 
wait and watch ; here the sentinel crows are 
posted while the flock pilfers corn and plugs 
melons ; here the flickers and woodpeckers light 

[259] 



for a quick lunch of grubs, to call for company 
or telegraph across the fields on one of the res- 
onant limbs ; here the flocking blackbirds swoop 
and settle, making the old tree look as if it had 
suddenly leaved out in mourning— leaves black 
and crackling 5 and here the turkey-buzzards 
halt heavily in their gruesomely glorious flight. 
With good field-glasses there is no other van- 
tage-ground for bird study equal to this. Not in 
a day's tramp will one see so many birds, and 
have such chances to observe them, as in a single 
hour, when the sun is rising or setting, in the 
neighborhood of some great, gaunt tree that has 
died of years or lonesomeness, or been smitten 
by a bolt from the summer clouds. 




The sentinel crows are posted." 



[260] 



II 

Nature's prodigality and parsimony are ex- 
tremes farther apart than her east and west. 
Why should she be so lavish of interstellar 
space, and crowd a drop of stagnant water 
so? Why give the wide sea surface to the 
petrels, and screw the sea-urchins into the rocks 
on Grand Manan? Why scatter in Delaware 
Bay a million sturgeon eggs for every one 
hatched, while each mite of a Paramecium is 
cut in two, and wholes made of the halves? 
Why leave an entire forest of green, live pines 
for a lonesome crow hermitage, and convert the 
rottenest old stump into a submerged- tenth tene- 
ment ? 

Part of the answer, at least, is found in na- 
ture's hatred and horror of death. She fiercely 
refuses to have any dead. An empty heaven, a 
lifeless sea, an uninhabited rock, a dead drop of 
water, a dying Paramecium, are intolerable and 
impossible. She hastens always to give them 
life. The succession of strange dwellers to the 
decaying trees is an instance of her universal and 
endless effort at making matter live. 

[261] 



Such, vigilance over the ever-dying is very 
comforting— and marvelous too. Let any in- 
different apple-tree begin to have holes, and the 
tree-toads, the bluebirds, and the red squirrels 
move in, to fill the empty trunk with new life and 
the sapless limbs with fresh fruit. Let any tall, 
stray oak along the river start to die at the top, 
and straightway a pair of fish-hawks will load 
new life upon it. And these other, engrafted 
lives, like the graft of a greening upon wild 
wood, yield crops more valuable often, and 
always more interesting, than come from the 
native stock. 

Perhaps there is no more useless fruit or .timber 
grown than that of the swamp-gums (Nyssa uni- 
flora) of the Jersey bottoms. But if we value 
trees according to their capacity for cavities, — 
the naturalist has a right to such a scale of valua- 
tion, — then these gums rank first. The deliberate 
purpose of a swamp -gum, through its hundred 
years of life, is to grow as big as possible, that 
it may hollow out accordingly. They are the 
natural home-makers of the swamps that border 
the rivers and creeks in southern New Jersey. 
What would the coons, the turkey-buzzards, and 

[262] 



the owls do without them? The wild bees 
believe the gunis are especially built for thera. 
Xo white-painted hive, with its disappearing 
squares, offers half as much safety to these free- 
booters of the summer seas as the gums, open- 
hearted, thick-walled, and impregnable. 

When these trees alone make up the swamp, 
there is a roomy, empty, echo-y effect among the 
great gray boles, with their high, horizontal 
limbs spanned like rafters above, produced by 
no other trees I know. It is worth a trip across 
the continent to listen, under a clear autumn 
moon, to the cry of a coon-dog far away in the 
empty halls of such a swamp. To get the true 
effect of a barred owl's hooting, one wants to 
find the home of a pair in an ancient gum-swamp. 
I know such a home, along Cohansey Creek, 
where, the neighboring farmer tells me, he has 
heard the owls hoot in spring and autumn since 
he remembers hearing anything. 

I cannot reach around the butt of the tree that 
holds the nest. Tapering just a trifle and a 
little on the lean, it runs up smooth and round 
for twenty feet, where a big bulge occurs, just 
above which is the capacious opening to the 

[263] 



owls' cave. There was design in the bulge, or 
foresight in the owls' choice ; for that excres- 
cence is the hardest thing to get beyond I ever 
climbed up to. But it must be mounted, or the 
queerest pair of little dragons ever hatched will 
go unseen. 

The owls themselves first guided me to the 
spot. I was picking my way through this piece 
of woods, one April day, when a shadowy some- 
thing swung from one high limb to another 
overhead, following me. It was the female owl. 
Every time she lighted she turned and fixed her 
big black eyes hard on me, silent, somber, and 
watchful. As I pushed deeper among the gums, 
she began to snap her beak and drop closer. 
Her excitement grew every moment. I looked 
about for the likely tree. The instant I spied 
the hole above the bulge, the owl caught the 
direction of my eyes, and made a swoop at me 
that I thought meant total blindness. 

I began to climb. With this the bird lapsed 
into the quiet of despair, perched almost in 
reach of me, and began to hoot mournfully : 
Woo-hoo, tvoo-hoo, woo-hoo, oo-oo-a ! And faint 
and far away came back a timid Woo-hoo, woo-a ! 

[264] 




from her mate, safely hid, across 
the creek. 

The weird, uncanny cry 
rolled round under the 
roof of limbs, and 
seemed to wake a 
ghost- owl in every 
hollow bole, echoing 
and reechoing as it 
called from tree to 
tree, to die away 
down the dim, deep 
vistas of the swamp. 
The silent wings, the 
snapping beaks, the eery 
hoots in the soft gloom of 
the great trees, needed the 
help of but little imagina- 
tion to carry one back to the threshold of an 
unhacked world, and embolden its nymphs and 
satyrs, that these centuries of science have hunted 
into hiding. 

I wiggled above the bulge at the risk of life, 
and was greeted at the mouth of the cavern with 
hisses and beak-snappings from within. It was 

[ 265 ] 



" She turned and 
fixed her big black 
eyes hard on me." 



a raw spring day ; snow still lingered in shady 
spots. But here, backed against the farther 
wall of the cavity, were two young owls, scarcely 




"Wrapped up like little Eskimos." 



a week old, wrapped up like little Eskimos— 
tiny bundles of down that the whitest-toothed 
frost could never bite through. 

Yery green babies of all kinds are queer, un- 

[266] 



certain, indescribable creations— faith genera- 
tors. But the greenest, homeliest, unlikeliest, 
babiest babes I ever encountered were these two 
in the hole. I wish Walt Whitman had seen 
them. He would have written a poem. They 
defy my powers of portrayal, for they challenge 
the whole mob of my normal instincts. 

But quite as astonishing as the appearance of 
the young owls was the presence beneath their 
feet of the head of a half-grown "muskrat, the 
hind quarters of two frogs, one large meadow- 
vole, and parts of four mice, with many other 
pieces too small to identify. These all were 
fresh— the crumbs of one night's dinner, the 
leavings of one night's catch. If these were the 
fragments only, what would be a conservative 
estimate of the night's entire catch % 

Gilbert White tells of a pair of owls that built 
under the eaves of Selborne Church, that he 
" minuted" with his " watch for an hour to- 
gether," and found that they returned to the 
nest, the one or the other, "about once in every 
five minutes " with a mouse or some little beast 
for the young. Twelve mice an hour ! Suppose 
they hunted only two evening hours a day? 

[267] 



The record at the summer's end is almost beyond 
belief. 

Not counting what the two old owls ate, and 
leaving out of the count the two frogs, it is within 
limits to reckon not less than six small animals 
brought to the hollow gum every night of the 
three weeks that these young owls were depen- 
dent for food— a riddance in this short time of 
not less than one hundred and twenty-five musk- 
rats, mice, and voles. What four boys in the 
same time could clear the meadows of half that 
number? And these animals are all harmful, 
the muskrats exceedingly so, where the meadows 
are made by dikes and embankments. 

Not a tree in South Jersey that spring bore a 
more profitable crop. When fruit-growing in 
Jersey is done for pleasure, the altruistic farmer 
with a love for natural history will find large 
reward in his orchards of gums, that now are 
only swamps. 

Just as useful as the crop of owls, and beyond 
all calculation in its sweetening effects upon our 
village life, is the annual yield of swallows by 
the piles in the river. Years ago a high spring 
tide carried away the south wing of the old 

[268] 







" It is no longer a sorry forest of battered, sunken stumps." 

bridge, but left the piles, green and grown over 
with moss, standing with their heads just above 
flood-tide mark. In the tops of the piles are 
holes, bored to pass lines through, or left by 
rusted bolts, and eaten wide by waves and wind. 
Besides these there are a few genuine excava- 
tions made by erratic woodpeckers. This whole 
clump of water-logged piles has been colonized 

[269] 



by blue-backed tree-swallows, every crack and 
cranny wide enough and deep enough to hold a 
nest being appropriated for domestic uses by a 
pair of the dainty people. It is no longer a 
sorry forest of battered, sunken stumps ; it is a 
swallow- Venice. And no gayer gondoliers ever 
glided over wave-paved streets than these swal- 
lows on the river. When the days are longest 
the village does its whittling on the new bridge 
in the midst of this twittering bird life, watch- 
ing the swallows in the sunset skim and flash 
among the rotting timbers over the golden-flow- 
ing tide. 

If I turn from the river toward the woods 
again, I find that the fences all the way are 
green with vines and a-hum with bumblebees. 
Even the finger-board at the cross-roads is a liv- 
ing pillar of ivy. All is life. There are no dead, 
no graveyards anywhere. A nature-made ceme-. 
tery does not exist in my locality. Yonder, 
where the forest-fire came down and drank of 
the river, is a stretch of charred stumps ; but 
every one is alive with some sort of a tenant. 
Not one of these stumps is a tombstone. We 
have graves and slabs and names in our burial- 

[270] 



place, and nothing more. Bnt there is not so 
much as a slab in the fields and woods. When 
the telegraph-poles and the piles are cut, the 
stmnps are immediately prepared for new life, 
and soon begin blossoming into successive beds 
of mosses and mushrooms, while the birds are 
directed to follow the bare poles and make them 
live again. 

A double line of these pole-specters stretches 
along the road in front of my door, holding hands 
around the world. I have grown accustomed to 
the hum of the wires, and no longer notice the 
sound. But one May morning recently there 
was a new note in the pole just outside the yard. 
I laid my ear to the wood. Pick— jyick— pick ; 
# then all was still. Again, after a moment's pause, 
I heard pick— pick— pick on the inside. At my 
feet was a scattering of tiny yellow chips. Back- 
ing off a little, I discovered the hole, about the 
size of my fist, away up near the cross-bars. It 
was not the first time I had found High-hole 
laying claim to the property of the telegraph 
companies. I stole back and thumped. Instantly 
a dangerous bill and a flashing eye appeared, and 
High-hole, with his miner's lamp burning red 

[271] 





" Even the finger- 
board is a living 
pillar of ivy." 

in the top of his cap 
lunged off across the 
^wy , fields in some ill humor, no doubt. 

Throughout the summer there was telegraph- 
ing with and without wires on that dry, resonant 
pole. And meantime, if there was anything un- 
intelligible in the ciphers at Glasgow or Washing- 
ton, it was high-hole talk. For there was reared 
inside that pole as large, as noisy, and as red- 
headed a family of nickers as ever hatched. What 
a brood they were ! They must have snarled 
the wires and Babelized their talk terribly. 

[272] 



While this robust and uncultured family of 
flickers were growing up, only three doors away 
(counting by poles) a modest and soft-voiced 
pair of bluebirds, with a decently numbered 
family of four, were living in a hole so near the 
ground that I could look in upon the meek but 
brave little mother. 

There is still another dead-tree crop that the 
average bird-lover and summer naturalist rarely 
gathers— I mean the white-footed mice. They 
are the j oiliest little beasts in all the tree hollows. 
It is when the woods are bare and deep with 
snow, when the cold, dead winter makes outside 
living impossible, that one really appreciates 
the coziness and protection of the life in these 
deep rooms, sunk like wells into the hearts of 
the trees. With what unconcern the mice await 
nightfall and the coming of the storms ! They 
can know nothing of the anxiety and dread of 
the crows ; they can share little of the crows' 
suffering in the bitter nights of winter. A 
warm, safe bed is a large item in out-of-doors 
living when it is cold ; and I have seen where 
these mice tuck themselves away from the dark 
and storm in beds so snug and warm that I 

w [273] 



wished to be an elf myself, with white feet and 
a long tail, to creep in with them. 

I had some wood- choppers near the house on 
the lookout for mice, but, though they often 
marked the stumps where they had cut into 
nests, the winter nearly passed before I secured 
a single white -foot. Coming up from the pond 
one day with a clerical friend, after a vain at- 
tempt to skate, we lost our way in the knee- 
deep snow, and while floundering about happened 
upon a large dead pine that was new to me. It 
was as stark, as naked, and as dead a tree, ap- 
parently, as ever went to dust. The limbs were 
broken off a foot or more from the trunk, and 
stuck out like stumps of arms ; the top had been 
drilled through and through by woodpeckers, 
and now lay several feet away, buried in the 
snow ; and the bole, like the limbs, was without 
a shred of bark, but covered instead with a thin 
coating of slime. This slime was marked with 
fine scratches, as would be made by the nails of 
very small animals. I almost rudely interrupted 
my learned friend's discussion of the documen- 
tary hypothesis with the irreverent exclamation 
that there were mice in the old corpse. The 

[274] 



Hebrew scholar stared at the tree. Then he 
stared at me. Had I gone daft so suddenly? 
But I was dropping off my overcoat and order- 
ing him away to borrow the ax of a man we 
heard chopping. He looked utterly undone, 
but thought it best to humor me, though I know 
he dreaded putting an ax in my hands just then, 
and would infinitely rather have substituted his 
skates. I insisted, however, and he disappeared 
for the ax. 

The snow was deep, the pine was punky and 
would easily fall ; and now was the chance to get 
my mice. They were in there, I knew, for those 
fine, fresh scratches told of scramblers gone up 
to the woodpecker holes since the last storm. 

The preacher appeared with the ax. Off came 
his coat. He was as eager now as though this 
tottering pine were an altar of Baal. He was 
anxious, also, to know if I had an extra sense— 
a kind of X-ray organ that saw mice at the cen- 
ters of trees. And, priest though he was (shame 
on the human animal !), he had grown excited 
at the prospect of the chase of — mice ! 

I tramped away the snow about the tree. The 
ax was swinging swiftly through the air ; the 

[275] 



preacher was repeating between strokes : "I'm 
— truly — sorry — man's — dominion — has — " when 
suddenly there was a crunch, a crash, and the 
axnian leaped aside with the yell of a fiend ; for, 
as the tree struck, three tiny, brown-backed, 
white -footed creatures were dashed into the soft 
snow. "The prettiest thing I ever saw," he de- 
clared enthusiastically, as I put into his hand 
the only mouse captured. 

We traced the chambers up and down the 
tree as they wound, stairway-like, just inside 
the hard outer shell. Here and there we came 
upon garners of acorns and bunches of bird 
feathers and shredded bark — a complete fortress 
against the siege of winter. 

That pine had not borne a green needle for a 
decade. It was too long dead and too much de- 
cayed to have even a fat knot left. Yet there 
was not a livelier, more interesting tree in the 
region that winter, nor one half so full of goings 
on, as this same old shell of a pine, with scarcely 
heart enough to stand. 



[276] 



WOOD-PUSSIES 




W\ 



WOOD-PUSSIES 

ONE real source of the joy in out-of-door 
study lies in its onetime character. A 
serious, bread-winning study of birds must be a 
lamentable vocation ; it comes to measuring egg- 
shells merely, and stuffing skins. To get its real 
tonic, nature study must not be carried on with 
Walden Pond laboriousness, nor with the unre- 
lieved persistence of a five years aboard a Beagle. 
Darwin staggered under the burden of his obser- 
vations ; and Thoreau says : " I would not have 
any one adopt my mode of living ; for before he 
has fairly learned it I may have found out an- 
other for myself "—and so he did. 

No ; the joy in wild things is the joy of being 
wild with them— vacation joy. Think of being 
forced to gather ants and watch spiders for a 
living ! It would be quite as bad as making 
poetry or prophecy one's profession. From the 
day Mohammed formally adopts Koran-making 

[279] 



as a business, he begins to lose his spontaneity and 
originality, and grows prosy and artificial, even 
plagiaristic. Nature shuns the professional. 
She makes her happiest visits as short sur- 
prises, delightful interruptions and diversions 
in the thick of our earnest business. 

You can take no vacation in the mountains? 
Then snatch a few minutes before the seven- 
o'clock whistle blows, or while you hoe, or be- 
tween office -hours, to look and listen. The 
glimpses of wild life caught at such times will be 
flashes of revelation. It may be the instant pic- 
ture of a gray fox leaping at a buzzard from 
behind a bush as the train drives across the wide, 
blank prairies of southern Kansas ; or a warm 
time with wasps while mowing in New Jersey ; 
or the chirp of sparrows in passing King's Chapel 
Burial-ground when a cold winter twilight is 
settling over Boston 5 or the chance meeting of 
a wood-pussy on your way home from singing- 
school in Maine. Whatever the picture, and 
wherever obtained, coming in this unexpected 
way, it is sure to be more lasting, meaningful, and 
happy than volumes of the kind gathered after 
long days of tramping with gun and glass. 

[280] 



Any one can acquaint himself with the out-of- 
doors, if he keeps his eyes and ears open and 
lives a little while, should his lines happen to 
fall even in a city. Most cities have parks, or a 
river, or a zoological garden. A zoological gar- 
den is not to be despised by the naturalist. 
About ninety-nine hundredths of every wild 
animal remains wild in spite of iron bars and 
peanuts and visitors. 

There is one little creature, however, that you 
must live at least on the edge of the country to 
know, for I never saw a zoological garden that 
had a pit or cage for him. Yet he is not a blood- 
thirsty nor a venomous beast ; in fact, he is as 
harmless as a rabbit and every whit as interest- 
ing as a prairie-dog. Nevertheless it is of no 
use to look for him in the city. You must go 
out to the outskirts, to the farms and pastures, if 
you would meet the wood-pussy. And even 
here you must not look for him, but go to church 
or visit the neighbors after dark and let the 
wood-pussy look for you. It will be alto- 
gether a rare and interesting experience, an 
encounter to remember. 

But what is a wood-pussy? That is the 
[281] 



question I asked myself the first night I spent in 
Maine. I had occasion to go down the road 
that night, and as my hostess handed me the 
lantern she said warningly, "Look out for the 
wood pussies on the way." From what I was 
able to put together that night I was sure that 
" wood-pussy " was a very pretty down-east name 
for what, in New Jersey, I had always called a 
skunk. 

I have had about a dozen unsought meetings 
with this greatly dreaded, seldom- named, but 
much-talked-of creature. Most of them are 
moonlight scenes — pictures of dimly lighted, 
shadow-flecked paths, with a something larger 
than a cat in them, standing stock-still or moving 
leisurely toward me, silvered now with pale light, 
now uncertain and monstrous where the shadows 
lie deepest. With these memories always come 
certain strange sensations of scalp -risings, chill 
feelings of danger, of wild adventure, and of hair- 
breadth escape. 

I have never met a skunk at night that did 
not demand (and receive) the whole path, even 
when that path was the State highway. Dispute 
the authority of a skunk? No more than I 

[282] 



should the best-known ranger's in Texas when 
requested to hold up my hands. The skunk is 
the only animal left in the East that you will not 
parley with. Try to stare the Great Stone Face 
out of countenance if you wish, but when a 
skunk begins to sidle toward you, do not try to 
stare him out of the path ; just sidle in the direc- 
tion he sidles, and sidle as fast as you can. 

Late one afternoon I was reading by the side 
of a little ravine on one of the islands in Casco 
Bay. The sharp, rocky walls of the cut were 
shaded by scrub-pines and draped with dewberry- 
vines. Presently the monotonous slop of the 
surf along the shore, growing fainter as the tide 
ebbed, was broken by a stir in the dry leaves at 
the bottom of the ravine. I listened. Something 
was moving below me. Creeping cautiously to 
the edge, I looked down, and there, in a narrow 
yard between two boulders, not ten feet beneath 
me, was a family of seven young skunks. 

They were about three weeks old,— " kittens," 
the natives called them,— and seemed to be play- 
ing some kind of a rough-and-tumble game to- 
gether. Funny little bunches of black and white 
they were, with pointed noses, beady black eyes, 

[283] 




" A family of seven young skunks." 



arid very grand tails. They were jet-black, ex- 
cept for white tips to their tails and a pure 
white mark beginning on the top of their heads 
and dividing down their sides like the letter V. 

My presence was unsuspected and their play 
went on. It was a sight worth the rest of the 
vacation. When you find wild animals so far off 
their guard as to play, do as Captain Cuttle sug- 
gests— "make a note of it. 7 ' It is a red-letter 
experience. 

I doubt if there is another set of children 
in all the out-of-doors so apparently incapable 
of playing as a set of young skunks. You 
have watched lambs stub and wabble about in 
their gambols, clumsy and unsafe upon their legs 
because there was so little body to hold down so 
much legs. These young skunks were clumsier 
than the wabbliest-legged lambkin that you ever 
saw, and for just the opposite reason— there was 
so little legs to hold up so much body. Such 
humpty-dumpty babies ! They fell over each 
other, over the stones, and over their paws as if 
paws were made only to be tumbled over. Their 
surest, quickest way of getting anywhere was to 
upset and roll to it. 

[285] 



It was a silent playground, as all animal play- 
grounds are. The stir of the dead leaves and 
now and then a faint hiss was all I could hear. 
Who has ever heard any noise from untamed 
animals at play? One day I came softly upon 
two white-footed mice playing in the leaves 
along a wood-road and squeaking joyously ; but 
as a rule the children of the wilds, no matter how 
exciting their games, rarely utter a word. Si- 
lence is the first lesson they are taught. Or is it 
now instinctive 1 Have not generations of bitter 
life -struggle made the animals so timid and 
wary that the young are born with a dread 
of discovery so strong that they never shout 
in their play 1 ? This softness and silence was 
the only striking difference to be seen in the 
play of these young skunks here in the falling 
twilight, safely hidden among the rocks of the 
wild ravine, and that of school- children upon a 
village green. 

The child is much the same, whether the par- 
ticular species is four-footed or whether it goes 
on two feet. Here below me one of the little 
toddlers got a bump that hurt him, and it made 
him just as mad as a bump ever did me. There 

[286] 



was a fuss in a twinkling. He stamped with 
both fore 'feet, showed his teeth, humped his 
back, and turned both ends of his tiny body, like 
a pinched wasp, toward every one that came 
near him. The others knew what that particu- 
lar twist meant and kept their distance. I knew 
the import of that movement, too. These young 
things had already learned their lesson of self- 
defense. I believe that a three-weeks-old skunk 
could hold his own against the world. 

The dusk was deepening rapidly in the ravine j 
and I was just about to shout to see how they 
would take it, when a long black snout was 
thrust slowly out from beneath a piece of the 
ledge, and the mother of the young skunks 
appeared. Without giving them a look, she 
crawled off around a rock. The family followed j 
and here they all fell to eating something — what, 
I could not see. I tried to scare them away, but 
at my commands they only switched their tails 
and doubled into defensive attitudes. Finally 
with some stones I drove them, like so many huge 
crabs, into the den, and— horrors ! they were eat- 
ing one of their own kin, a full-grown skunk, the 
father of their family, for all they knew or cared, 

[287] 



that had been killed the night before in one of 
the islander's chicken-coops. 

The skunk is no epicure. The matter of eat- 
ing one's husband or wife, one's father or mother, 
has never struck the skunk as out of the ordinary. 
As far as my observation goes, the supreme ques- 
tion with him is, Can this thing be swallowed? 
Such thoughts as, What is it? How does it taste ? 
Will it digest? Is it good form?— no skunk since 
the line began ever allowed to interfere with his 
dinner. An enviable disregard, this of dietetics ! 
To eat everything with a relish ! If the testi- 
mony of Maine farmers can be credited, this ani- 
mal is absolutely omnivorous. During the winter 
the skunks burrow and sleep, several of them 
in the same hole. When they go in they are as 
fat as September woodchucks ; but long before 
spring, the farmers tell me, the skunks grow 
so lean and hungry that, turning cannibal, they 
fall upon their weaker comrades and devour 
them, only the strongest surviving until the 
spring. 

In August, along the Kennebec, I found the 
skunks attacking the sugar corn. They strip the 
ears that hang close to the ground, and gnaw the 

[288] 



T %llfr 



Jit *> 




I 



The family followed.' 



19 



milky grain. But they do most damage among 
the chickens. For downright destructiveness, a 
knowing old skunk, with a nice taste for pullets 
and a thorough acquaintance with the barn-yard, 
discounts even Reynard. Reynard is the reputed 
arch-enemy of poultry, yet there is a good deal 
of the sportsman about him ; he has some sort of 
honor, a sense of the decency of the game. The 
skunk, on the contrary, is a poacher, a slaugh- 
terer for the mere sake of it. My host, in a single 
night, had fourteen hens killed by a skunk that 
dug under the coop and deliberately bit them 
through the neck. He is not so cunning nor so 
swift as the fox, but the skunk is no stupid. He 
is cool and calm and bold. He will advance 
upon and capture a hen-house, and be off to his 
den, while a fox is still studying his map of the 
farm. 

Yet, like every other predatory creature, the 
skunk more than balances his debt for corn and 
chickens by his credit for the destruction of 
obnoxious vermin. He feeds upon insects and 
mice, destroying great numbers of the latter by 
digging out the nests and eating the young. But 
we forget our debt when the chickens disap- 

[290] 



pear, no matter how few we lose. Shall we ever 
learn to say, when the redtail swoops among the 
pigeons, when the rabbits get into the cabbage, 
when the robins rifle the cherry-trees, and when a 
skunk helps himself to a hen for his Thanksgiving 
dinner — shall we ever learn to love and under- 
stand the fitness of things out of doors enough 
to say, 

But then, poor beastie, thou maun live? 

The skunk is a famous digger. There are gi- 
gantic stories in Maine, telling how he has been 
seen to escape the hound by digging himself 
out of sight in the middle of an open field. I 
have never tried to run down a skunk, and so 
never gave one the opportunity of showing me 
all he is capable of as a lightning excavator ; 
but, unless all my experience is wrong, a skunk 
would rather fight or run or even die than exert 
himself to the extent of digging a home. In the 
majority of cases their lairs are made by other 
paws than their own. 

One of the skunk's common tricks is to take 
up his abode with a woodchuck. As wood- 
chucks, without exception, are decent sort of 

[291] 



folk, they naturally object ; but the unwelcome 
visitor, like Tar Baby, says nothing ; simply 
gives his host the privilege of remaining in 
his own house if he chooses. He chooses to 
go, of course, and the easy-minded interloper 
settles down comfortably at home. But it is not 
long before a second wanderer chances upon this 
hole, and, without thanks or leave, shares the 
burrow with the first. This often goes on until 
the den is crowded— until some farmer's boy digs 
out a round half-dozen. 

From such a lair as headquarters the skunks 
forage at night, each making off alone to a fa- 
vorite haunt, and returning before daybreak for 
safety and sleep. But a peculiar thing about 
these lodges, as about the family den in the ra- 
vine, is their freedom from the hateful musk. 
One rarely detects any odor about a skunk's 
burrow. I had been within twenty feet of this 
one on the island most of the afternoon and had 
not known it. How are a number of skunks 
living in a single burrow for weeks able to keep 
it sweet, when one of them, by simply passing 
through a ten-acre field of blossoming clover, will 
make it unendurable f It certainly speaks well 

[292] 



for the creature's personal cleanliness, or else is 
proof of his extreme caution against discovery. 

The odor will easily carry with the wind three 
miles. On the spot where the animal has been 
shot, you will remember it a twelvemonth after 
whenever it rains. "Do you want to know how 
to shoot a skunk on your kitchen steps and never 
know it twenty -four hours after?" queried my 
Kennebec authority on these beasts. I did, of 
course, though I never expected a skunk to take 
up his stand on my kitchen steps and compel me 
to despatch him. 

"Well, shoot him dead, of course ; then let him 
lie there three days. All that smell will come 
back to him, no matter how far off it 's gone. 
It '11 all come up out of the boards, too, and go 
into him, and you can carry him away by the 
tail and never know a skunk 's been on the 
farm. It 's curious how a skunk can make a 
smell, but never have any ; and it 's curious how 
it all returns to him when he dies. Most things 
are curious, ain't they?" I agreed that they 
were. 

But to return to my family in the ravine. 
The next morning I went back to the glen and 

[293] 



caught three of these young ones. They made 
no resistance, — merely warned me to be careful, 
—and I took them to the house. For several 
days I fed them fish and fruit until they became 
so tame that I could handle them without cau- 
tion. But they were hopelessly dull and uninter- 
esting pets, never showing the least intelligence, 
curiosity, or affection. I finally turned them 
loose among their native rocks, and they strayed 
off as unconcerned as if they had not spent two 
weeks away from home, shut up in a soap-box. 

There seems to be little excuse, in this broad 
land of opportunity, for any one's going into 
skunk-farming for a business ; but these animals 
have a good market value, and so, in spite of a 
big country and rich resources, our hands are so 
eager for gold that every summer we hear of new 
skunk farms. Still, why not raise skunks'? 
They are more easily kept than pigs or pigeons j 
they multiply rapidly ; their pelts make good (?) 
marten-skins ; and I see no reason why any 
one having a piece of woodland with a stream 
in it, and a prairie or an ocean on each side of 
it, could not fence it in, stock it with skunks, and 
do a profitable and withal an interesting business. 

[294] 



FROM RIVER-OOZE TO TREE-TOP 



FEOM EIVEE-OOZE TO TEEE-TOP 

THEEE are many lovers of the out-of-doors 
who court her in her robes of roses and in 
her blithe and happy hours of bird-song only. 
Now a lover that never sees her barefoot in the 
meadow, that never hears her commonplace 
chatter at the frog-pond, that never finds her in 
her lowly, humdrum life among the toads and 
snakes, has little genuine love for his mistress. 

To know the pixy when one sees it, to call the 
long Latin name of the ragweed, to exclaim over 
the bobolink's song, to go into ecstasies at a glori- 
ous sunset, is not, necessarily, to love nature at 
all. One who does all this sincerely, but who 
stuffs his ears to the din of the spring frogs, is 
in love with nature's pretty clothes, her dainty 
airs and fine ways. Her warm, true heart lies 
deeper down. When one has gone down to that, 
then a March without peepers will be as lone- 
' [ 297 ] 



some as a crowd without friends ; then an orchard 
without the weather-wise hyla can never make 
good his place with mere apples ; and the front 
door without a solemn, philosophic toad beneath 
its step will lack something quite as needful to 
its evening peace and homeness as it lacks when 
the old-fashioned roses and the honeysuckle are 
gone. 

We are not humble nor thoughtful out of 
doors. There is too much sentiment in our pas- 
sion for. nature. We make colored plates and 
poems to her. All honor to the poets ! especially 
to those who look carefully and see deeply, like 
Wordsworth and Emerson and Whitman. But 
what the common run of us needs, when we go 
a-wooing nature, is not more poetry, but a scien- 
tific course in biology. How a little study in 
comparative anatomy, for instance, would reveal 
to us the fearful and wonderful in the make-up 
of all animal forms ! And the fearful and won- 
derful have a meaning and a beauty which we 
ought to realize. 

We all respond to the flowers and birds, for 
they demand no mental effort. What about the 
snakes and frogs % Do we shiver at them? Do 

[298] 



we more than barely endure them ? No one can 
help feeling the comfort and sympathy of the 
bluebird. The very drifts soften as he appears. 
He comes some March morning in a flurry of 
snow, or drops down out of a cheerless, soaking 
sky, and assures us that he has just left the South 
and has hurried ahead at considerable hazard to 
tell us that spring is on the way. Yet, here is 
another voice, earlier than the bluebird's often, 
with the bluebird's message, and with even more 
than the bluebird's authority $ but who will 
listen to a frog? A prophet is not without 
honor save in his own country. One must needs 
have wings and come from a foreign land to be 
received among us as a prophet of the spring. 
Suppose a little frog noses his way up through 
the stiff, cold mud, bumps against the ice, and 
pipes, Spring ! spring ! spring ! Has he not 
as much claim upon our faith as a bird that drops 
down from no one knows where, with the same 
message? The bluebird comes because he has 
seen the spring 5 Hyla comes because he has the 
spring in his heart. He that receives Hyla in 
the name of a prophet shall receive a prophet's 
reward. 

[299] 






\ 



1 Spring ! spring ! spring ! ' ; 



For me there is no clearer call in all the year 
than that of the hylas' in the break-up clays of 
March. The sap begins to start in my roots at 
the first peep. There is something in their brave 
little summons, as there is in the silvery light on 
the pussy-willows, that takes hold on my hope 
and courage, and makes the March mud good to 
tramp through. And this despite the fact that 
these early hylas so aggravated my first attack 
of homesickness that I thought it was to be fatal. 
The second night I ever spent away from home 
and my mother was passed with old Mrs. Tribbet, 
who had a large orchard, behind which was a 
frog-pond. In vain did she stay me with raisins 
and comfort me with apples. I was sick for 
home. And those frogs ! When the guineas got 
quiet, how dreadful they made the long May 
twilight with their shrieking, strangling, home- 
sick cries ! After all these years I cannot listen 
to them in the evenings of early spring without 
catching an echo from the back of that orchard, 
without just a throb of that pain so near to 
breaking my heart. 

Close by, in a corner lot between the two 
cross-roads of the village, lies a wretched little 

[301] 



puddle, the home of countless hylas until the 
June suns dry it up. Among the hundred or 
more people who live in the vicinity and who 
pass the pond almost daily, I think that I am 
the only one who, until recently, was sure he 
had ever seen a peeper, and knew that they were 
neither tadpoles, salamanders, nor turtles. As 
I was standing by the puddle, one May day, a 
good neighbor came along and stopped with me. 
The chorus was in full blast— cricket-frogs, Pick- 
ering's frogs, spring frogs, and, leading them all, 
the melancholy quaver of Bufo, the " hop-toad." 

"What is it that makes the dreadful noise V 
my neighbor asked, meaning, I knew, by "dread- 
ful noise," the song of the toad. I handed her 
my opera-glass, pointed out the minstrel with the 
doleful bagpipe sprawling at the surface of the 
water, and, after sixty years of wondering, she 
saw with immense satisfaction that one part in . 
this familiar spring medley was taken by the 
common toad. 

Sixty springs are a good many springs to be 
finding out the author of so well-known a sound 
as this woeful strain of the serenading toad ; but 
more than half a century might be spent in 

[302] 



catching a cricket-frog at his song. I tried to 
make my neighbor see one that was clinging to 
a stick in the middle of the puddle : but her eyes 




. 




if 






m 



£ ^%. 



" A wretched little puddle." 

were dim. Deft hands have dressed these peep- 
ers. AVe have heard them by the nieadowful 
eA^ery spring of our life, and yet the fingers of 
one hand number more than the peepers we have 
seen. One day I bent over three lily-pads till 

[303] 



nearly blind, trying to make ont a cricket-frog 
that was piping all the while somewhere near or 
upon them. At last, in despair, I made a dash 
at the pads, only to see the wake as the peeper 
sank to the bottom an instant before my net 
struck the surface. 

The entire frog family is as protectively col- 
ored as this least member, the cricket-frog. They 
all carry fern-seed in their pockets and go invis- 
ible. Notice the wood-frog with his tan suit and 
black cheeks. He is a mere sound as he hops 
about over the brown leaves. I have had him 
jump out of the way of my feet and vanish while 
I stared hard at him. He lands with legs ex- 
tended, purposely simulating the shape of the 
ragged, broken leaves, and offers, as the only 
clue for one's baffled eyes, the moist glisten as 
his body dissolves against the dead brown of the 
leaf- carpet. The tree -toad, Hyla versicolor, still 
more strikingly blends with his surroundings, for, 
to a certain extent, he can change color to match 
the bark upon which he sits. More than once, in 
climbing apple-trees, I have put my hand upon 
a tree-toad, not distinguishing it from the patches 
of gray-green lichen upon the limbs. But there 

[304] 



is less of wonder in the tree-toad's ability to 
change his colors than in the way he has of 
changing his clothes. He is never troubled 
with the getting of a new suit ; his labor comes 
in caring for his old ones. It is curious how he 
disposes of his cast-off clothes. 

One day late in autumn I picked up a tree- 
toad that was stiff and nearly dead with cold. I 
put him in a wide-mouthed bottle to thaw, and 
found by evening that he was quite alive, sitting 
with his toes turned in, looking much surprised 
at his new quarters. He made himself at home, 
however, and settled down comfortably, ready 
for what might happen next. 

The following day he climbed up the side of 
the bottle and slept several hours, his tiny disked 
toes holding him as easily and restfully as if he 
were stretched upon a feather-bed. I turned him 
upside down 5 but he knew nothing of it until 
later when he awoke ; then he deliberately turned 
round with his head up and went to sleep again. 
At night he was wide awake, winking and blink- 
ing at the lamp, and watching me through his 
window of green glass. 

A few nights after his rescue Hyla sat upon the 



20 



[305] 



bottom of his bottle in a very queer attitude. 
His eyes were drawn in, his head was bent down, 
his feet rolled up— his whole body huddled into 
a ball less than half its normal size. After a time 
he began to kick and gasp as if in pain, rolling 
and unrolling himself desperately. I thought he 
was dying. He would double up into a bunch, 
then kick out suddenly and stand up on his hind 
legs with his mouth wide open as if trying to 
swallow something. He was trying to swallow 
something, and the thing had stuck on the way. 
It was a kind of cord, and ran out of each corner 
of his mouth, passing over his front legs, thin- 
ning and disappearing most strangely along his 
sides. 

With the next gulp I saw the cord slip down 
a little, and, as it did so, the skin along his sides 
rolled up. It was his old suit ! He was taking 
it off for a new one ; and, instead of giving it to 
the poor, he was trying to economize by eating 
it. What a meal ! What a way to undress ! 
What curious economy ! 

Long ago the naturalists told us that the toads 
ate their skins— after shedding them ; but it was 
never made plain to me that they ate them while 

[306] 



changing them— indeed, swallowed them off! 
Three great gnlps more and the suit— shirt, 
shoes, stockings, and all— disappeared. Then 
Hyla winked, drew his clean sleeve across his 
mouth, and settled back with the very air of one 
who has magnificently sent away the waiter with 
the change. 

Four days later Hyla ate up this new suit. I 
saw the entire operation this time. It was al- 
most a case of surgery. He pulled the skin over 
his head and neck with his fore feet as if it were 
a shirt, then crammed it into his mouth j kicked 
it over his back next ; worked out his feet and 
legs ; then ate it off as before. The act was ac- 
complished with difficulty, and would have been 
quite impossible had not Hyla found the most 
extraordinary of tongues in his head. Next to 
the ability to speak Russian with the tongue 
comes the power to skin one's self with it. The 
tree-toad cannot quite croak Russian, but he can 
skin himself with his tongue. Unlike ours, his 
tongue is hung at the front end, with the free 
end forked and pointing toward his stomach. 
When my little captive had crammed his mouth 
full of skin, he stuck this fork of a tongue into it 

[307] 




" He was trying to 
swallow something." 



and forced it down his throat and held it down 
while he kicked and squirmed out of it. 

Though less beautifully clothed than Hyla, our 
common toad, Bufo, is just as carefully clothed. 
Where the rain drips from the eaves, clean, 
narrow lines of pebbles have been washed out of 
the lawn. On one side of the house the shade 
lies all day long and the grass is cool and damp. 
Here, in the shade, a large toad has lived for two 
summers. I rarely pass that way without seeing 
him, well hidden in the grass. For several days 
lately he had been missing, when, searching more 
closely one morning, I found him sunk to the 
level of his back in the line of pebbles, his spots 
and the glands upon his neck so mingling with 
the varied collection of gravel about him that 
only a practised eye, and that sharp with expec- 
tation, could have made him out. 

In a newly plowed field, with some of the fresh 
soil sticking to him, what thing could look more 
like a clod than this brown, shapeless lump of a 
toad? But there is a beauty even in this un- 
lovely form ; for here is perfect adaptability. 

Our canons of the beautiful are false if they 
do not in some way include the toad. Shall .we 

[308] 



measure all the out-of-doors by the linnet's song, 
the cardinal-flower's flame, and the hay-field's 
odor? Deeper, wider, more fundamental and 
abiding than these standards, lie the intellectual 
principles of plan and purpose and the intellec- 
tual quality of perfect execution. We shall love 
not alone with all our heart, but with all our 
mind as well. If we judge the world beautiful 
by the superficial standard of what happens to 
please our eye, we shall see no more of the world 
than we do of the new moon. Whole classes of 
animals and wide regions of the earth's surface 
must, by this test, be excluded. The only way 
the batrachians could possibly come in would 
be by rolling the frogs in bread-crumbs and fry- 
ing them. Treated thus, they look good and 
taste good, but this is all that can be said for the 
entire family. Studied, however, from the single 
view-point of protective coloring, or again, as 
illustrating the ease with which the clumsiest 
forms can be fitted to the widest variety of con- 
ditions, the toads do not suffer by any compari- 
son. In the light of such study, Bufo loses his 
repulsiveness and comes to have a place quite as 
unique as the duckbill's, and a personality not 

[309] 




less fascinating than the swallow's or the gray 
squirrel's. 

However, the toad to the most of us is anything 
but a poem. What, indeed, looks less lovely, less 
nimble and buoyant, more chained to the earth, 
than a toad I But stretch the least web between 
his toes, lengthen his hind legs, and — over he 
goes, the leopard-frog, champion high diver of 
the marsh ! Or, instead of the web, tip his toes 
with the tiniest disks, and— there he swings, 
Pickering's little hyla, clinging as easily to the 
under surface of that oak-leaf high in the tree as 
a fly clings to the kitchen ceiling. 

When a boy I climbed to the top of the flag- 
pole on one of the State geological survey sta- 
tions. The pole rose far above the surrounding 
pines— the highest point for miles around. As 
I clinched the top of the staff, gripping my fin- 
gers into the socket for the flag-stick, I felt 
something cold, and drawing myself up, found a 
tree-toad asleep in the hole. Under him was a 
second toad, and under the second a third — all 
dozing up here on the very topmost tip of all 
the region. 

From the river-ooze to the tree-top, nature 
[310] 



carries this toad-form simply by a thin web be- 
tween the toes, or by tiny disks at their tips. 
And mixing her greens and browns with just a 
dash of yellow, she paints them all so skilfully 
that, upon a lily-pad, beside a lump of clay, or 
against the lichened limb of an old apple-tree, 
each sits as securely as Perseus in the charmed 
helmet that made him invisible. 

The frogs have innumerable enemies among 
the water-birds, the fish, the snakes, and such 
animals as the fisher, coon, possum, and mink. 
The toads fortunately are supplied with glands 
behind their heads whose secretion is hateful to 
most of their foes, though it seems to be no 
offense whatever to the snakes. A toad's only 
chance, when a snake is after him, lies in hiding. 
I once saw a race between a toad and an adder 
snake, however, in which the hopper won. 

One bright May morning I was listening to the 
music of the church bells, as it floated out from 
the city and called softly over the fields, when 
my reverie was interrupted by a sharp squeak 
and a thud beside the log on which I sat ; some- 
thing dashed over my foot ; and I turned to 
catch sight of a toad bouncing past the log, mak- 

[311] 



ing hard for the brush along the fence. He 
scarcely seemed to touch the ground, but 
skimmed over the grass as if transformed into a 
midget jack-rabbit. His case was urgent ; and 
little wonder ! At the opposite end of the log ; 
raised four or five inches from the grass, her eyes 
hard glittering, her nose tilted in the air, and 
astonishment all over her face, swayed the flat, 
ugly head of a hognose- adder. Evidently she, 
too, had never seen a toad get away in any such 
time before ; and after staring a moment, she 
turned under the log and withdrew from the 
race, beaten. 

Hungry snakes and hot, dusty days are death 
to the toads. Bufo would almost as soon find 
himself at the bottom of a well as upon a dusty 
road in blazing sunshine. His day is the night. 
He is not particular about the moon. All he 
asks is that the night be warm, that the dew lay 
the dust and dampen the grass, and that the in- 
sects be out in numbers. At night the snakes are 
asleep, and so are most of those ugly, creaking 
beasts with rolling iron feet that come crushing 
along their paths. There is no foe abroad at 
night, and life, during these dark, quiet hours, 

[312] 



has even for a toad something like a dash of 
gaiety. 

In one of the large pastures not far away 
stands a pump. It is shaded by an ancient 
apple-tree, under which, when the days are 
hottest, the cattle gather to doze and dream. 
They have worn away the grass about the mossy 
trough, and the water, slopping over, keeps the 
spot cool and muddy the summer through. Here 
the toads congregate from every quarter of the 
great field. I stretched myself out flat on the 
grass one night and watched them in the moon- 
light. There must have been fifty here that 
night, hopping about over the wet place— as 
grotesque a band as ever met by woods or waters. 

We need no " second sight," no pipe of Pan, 
no hills of Latinos with a flock to feed, to find 
ourselves back in that enchanted world of the 
kelpies and satyrs. All we need to do is to use 
the eyes and ears we have, and haunt our hills 
by morning and by moonlight. Here in the 
moonlight around the old pump I saw goblins, 
if ever goblins were seen in the light of our 
moon. 

There was not a croak, not a squeak, not the 
[313] 



slightest sound ; save the small pit-pat, pit-pat, 
made by their hopping. There may have been 
some kind of toad talk among them, but listen 
never so closely, I could not catch a syllable 
of it. 

Where did they all come from? How did 
they find their way to this wet spot over the 
hills and across the acres of this wide pasture? 
You could walk over the field in the daytime 
and have difficulty in finding a single toad ; but 
here at night, as I lay watching, every few min- 
utes one would hop past me in the grass ; or 
coming down the narrow cow-paths in the faint 
light I could see a wee black bunch bobbing 
leisurely along with a hop and a stop, moving 
slowly toward the pump to join the band of his 
silent friends under the trough. 

Not because there was more food at the pump, 
nor for the joy of gossip, did the toads meet here. 
The one thing necessary to their existence is 
water, and doubtless many of these toads had 
crossed this pasture of fifteen acres simply to get 
a drink. I have known a toad to live a year 
without food, and another to die in three days 
for lack of water. And yet this thirsty little 

[314] 



"^ 



beast never knows the pleasure of a real drink, 
because lie does not know how to drink. 

I have kept toads confined in cages for weeks 
at a time, never allowing them water when I 
could not watch them closely, and I never saw 
one drink. Instead, they would sprawl out in 
the saucer on their big, expansive bellies, and 
soak themselves full, as they did here on the 
damp sand about the pump. 

Just after sunset, when the fireflies light up and 
the crickets and katydids begin to chirp, the toad 
that sleeps under my front step hops out of bed, 
kicks the sand off his back, and takes a long look 
at the weather. He seems to think as he sits 
here on the gravel walk, sober and still, with 
his face turned skyward. What does he think 
about? Is he listening to the chorus of the 
crickets, to the whippoorwills, or is it for supper 
he is planning % It may be of the vicissitudes of 
toad life, and of the mutability of all sublunary 
things, that he meditates. Who knows % Some 
day perhaps we shall have a batrachian psychol- 
ogy, and I shall understand what it is that my 
door-step lodger turns over and over in his mind 
as he watches the coming of the stars. All I can 

[315] 



do now is to minute his cogitations, and I remem- 
ber one evening when he sat thinking and wink- 
ing a full hour without making a single hop. 

As the darkness comes down he makes off for 
a night of bug-hunting. At the first peep of 
dawn, bulging plump at the sides, he turns back 
for home. Home to a toad usually means any 
place that offers sleep and safety for the day ; 
but if undisturbed, like the oae under the step, 
he will return to the same spot throughout the 
summer. This chosen spot may be the door-step, 
the cracks between the bricks of a well, or the 
dense leaves of a strawberry-bed. 

In the spring of 1899 so very little rain fell 
between March and June that I had to water 
my cucumber-hills. There was scarcely a morn- 
ing during this dry spell that I did not find sev- 
eral toads tucked away for the day in these moist 
hills. These individuals had no regular home, 
like the one under the step, but hunted up the 
coolest, shadiest places in the soft soil and made 
new beds for themselves every morning. 

Their bed-making is very funny, but not 
likely to meet the approval of the housewife. 
Wearied with the night's hunting, a toad comes 

[316] 



to the cool cucuniber-vines and proceeds at once 
to kick himself into bed. He backs and kicks 
and elbows into the loose sand as far as he can, 
then screws and twists till he is worked out of 
sight beneath the soil, hind end foremost. Here 
he lies, with only his big pop-eyes sticking out, 
half asleep, half awake. If a hungry adder 
crawls along, he simply pulls in his eyes, the 
loose sand falls over them, and the snake 
passes on. 

When the nights begin to grow chilly and 
there are threatenings of frost, the toads hunt up 
winter quarters, and hide deep down in some 
warm burrow — till to-morrow if the sun comes 
out hot, or, it may be, not to wake until next 
April. Sometimes an unexpected frost catches 
them, when any shelter must do, when even their 
snake-fear is put aside or forgotten. " Misery 
acquaints a man with strange bedfellows," said 
Trinculo, as he crawled in with Caliban from the 
storm. So might the toad say in an early frost. 

The workmen in a sandstone-quarry near by 
dug out a bunch of toads one winter, all mixed 
up with a bunch of adders. They were wriggled 
and squirmed together in a perfect jumble of 

[317] 








legs, heads, and tails— all in their dead winter 
sleep. Their common enemy, the frost, had 
taken them unawares, and driven them like 
friends into the crevice of the rocks, where they 
would have slept together until the spring had 
not the quarrymen unearthed them. 

There is much mystery shrouding this humble 
batrachian. Somewhere in everybody's imagina- 
tion is a dark cell harboring a toad. Reading 
down through literature, it is astonishing how 
often the little monster has hopped into it. 
There is chance for some one to make a big book 
of the fable and folk-lore that has been gathering 
through the ages about the toads. The stories 
of the jewels in their heads, of their age-long en- 
tombments in the rocks, of the warts and spells 
they induce, of their eating fire and dropping 
from the clouds, are legion. 

And there seems to be some basis of fact for 
all these tales. No one has yet written for us 
the life -history of the toad. After having 
watched the tadpole miracle, one is thoroughly 
prepared to see toads jump out of the fire, tumble 
from broken marble mantles, and fall from the 
clouds. I never caught them in my hat during 

[318] 



a shower j but I have stood on Mauricetown 
Bridge, when the big drops came pelting down, 
and seen those drops apparently turn into tiny 
toads as they struck the planks, until the bridge 
was alive with them ! Perhaps they had been 
hiding from the heat between the cracks of the 
planks— but there are people who believe that 
they came down from the clouds. 

How, again, shall I explain this bit of observa- 
tion f More than six years I lived near a mud- 
hole that dried up in July. I passed it almost 
daily. One spring there was a strange toad- call 
in the hole, a call that I had never heard any- 
thing like before— a deafening, agonizing roar, 
hoarse and woeful. I found on investigation that 
the water was moving with spade-foot toads. 
Two days later the hole was still ; every toad 
was gone. They disappeared ; and though I 
kept that little puddle under watch for several 
seasons after that, I have not known a spade-foot 
to appear there since. 

The water was almost jellied with their spawn, 
and a little later was swarming with spade-foot 
tadpoles. Then it began to dry Up, and some of 
the tadpoles were left stranded in the deep foot- 

[319] 




prints of the cows along the edge of the hole. 
Jnst as fast as the water disappeared in these 
foot-prints, the tails of the tadpoles were ab- 
sorbed and legs formed, and they hopped away 
— some of them a week before their brothers, 
that were hatched at the same time, bnt who 
had stayed in the middle of the pond, where the 
deeper water allowed them a longer babyhood 
for the use of their tails. So swiftly, under pres- 
sure, can nature work with this adaptable body 
of the toad ! 

Long before the sun-baked mud began to 
crack these young ones had gone — where? And 
whence came their parents, and whither went 
they ? When will they return ? 




[320] 



A BUZZARDS' BANQUET 



21 




In a state of soured silence.' 



A BUZZAKDS' BANQUET 

IS there anything ugly out of doors? Can 
the ardent, sympathetic lover of nature ever 
find her unlovely? We know that she is su- 
premely utilitarian, and we have only wonder 
and worship for her prodigal and perfect econ- 
omy. But does she always couple beauty with 
her utility? 

To her real lover nature is never tiresome nor 
uninteresting ; but often she is most fascinating 
when veiled. She has moods and tempers and 
habits, even physical blemishes, that are fre- 
quently discovered to the too pressing suitor : 
and though these may quicken his interest and 
faith, they often dissipate that halo of perfection 
with which first fancy clothed her. This inti- 
macy, this "seeing the very pulse of the machine," 
is what spoils poets like Burroughs and Thoreau : 
spoils them for poets to make them the truer 
philosophers. 

[323] 



Like the spots on the sun, all of nature's other 
blemishes disappear in the bright blaze of her 
loveliness when viewed through a veil, whether 
of shadows, or mists, or distance. This is half 
the secret of the spell of the night, of the mystery 
of the sea, and the enchantment of an ancient 
forest. From the depths of a bed in the meadow- 
grass there is perfection of motion, the very soul 
of poetry, in the flight of a buzzard far up under 
the blue dome of the sky ; but look at the same 
bald-headed, snaky-necked creature upon a fence- 
stake, and you wonder how leagues into the 
clouds ever hid his ugly visage from you. Mel- 
rose must be seen by moonlight. The light to 
see the buzzard in has never been on land or 
sea, has come no nearer than the high white 
clouds that drift far away in the summer sky. 

From an economic point of view the buzzard 
is an admirable creation. So are the robin, the 
oriole, and most other birds ; but these are ad- 
mirable also from the esthetic point of view. 
Not so the buzzard. He has the wings of 
Gabriel— the wings only ; for, truly, his neck 
and head are Lucifer's. If ugliness be an attri- 
bute of nature, then this bird is its expression 

[324] 




" Ugliness incarnate." 



incarnate. Not that he is wicked, but worse 
than wicked— repulsive. Now the jackal is a 
mean, sordid scamp, a miserable half-dog beast, 
a degenerate that has not fallen far, since he was 
never up very high. The buzzard, on the other 
hand, ivas a bird. What he is now is unnamable. 
He has fallen back below the reptiles, into a 
harpy with snake's head and bird's body— a vul- 
ture more horrid than any mythical monster. 

HaAdng once seen a turkey-buzzard feeding, 
one has no difficulty in accounting for the origin 
of those "angry creations of the gods " that de- 
filed the banquets of King Phineus. If there is 
any holiness of beauty, surely the turkey-buzzard 
with clipped wing is the most unholy, the most 
utterly lost soul in the world. 

One bright, warm day in January — a frog- 
waking day in southern New Jersey— I saw 
the buzzards in unusual numbers sailing over 
the pines beyond Cubby Hollow. Hoping for 
a glimpse of something social in the silent, un- 
emotional solitaries, I hurried over to the pines, 
and passing through the wood, found a score of 
the birds feasting just beyond the fence in an 
open field. 

[326] 



Creeping up close to the scene, I quietly hid 
in a big drift of leaves and corn-blades that the 
winds had piled in a corner of the worm-fence, 
and became an uninvited guest at the strangest, 
gruesomest assemblage ever gathered — a buz- 
zards' banquet. 

The silence of the nether world wrapped this 
festive scene. Like ugly shades from across the 
Styx came the birds, deepening the stillness with 
their swishing wings. It was an unearthly pic- 
ture : the bare, stub-stuck corn-field, the gloomy 
pines, the silent, sullen buzzards in the yellow 
winter sunlight ! 

The buzzards were stalking about when I ar- 
rived, all deliberately fighting for a place and a 
share of the spoil. They made no noise 5 and 
this dumb semblance of battle heightened the 
unearthliness of the scene. As they lunged 
awkwardly about, the ends of their over-long 
wings dragged the ground, and they tripped and 
staggered like drunken sailors on shore. The 
hobbling hitch of seals on land could not be less 
graceful than the strut of these fighting buzzards. 
They scuffled as long as there was a scrap to 
fight for, wordless and bloodless, not even a fea- 

[327] 



ther being disturbed, except those that rose with 
anger, as the hair rises on a dog's back. But the 
fight was terrible in its uncanniness. 




" Sailing over the pines." 



Upon the fence and in the top of a dead oak 
near by others settled, and passed immediately 
into a state of semi-consciousness that was almost 
a stupor. Gloomy and indifferent they sat, 
hunched up with their heads between their shoul- 
ders, perfectly oblivious of all mundane things. 
There was no sign of recognition between the 

[328] 



birds until they dropped upon the ground and 
began fighting. Let a crow join a feeding group 
of its fellows, and there will be considerable caw- 
ing 5 even a sparrow, coming into a flock, will 
create some chirping : but there was not so much 
as the twist of a neck when a new buzzard joined 
or left this assemblage. Each bird sat as if he 
were at the center of the Sahara Desert, as 
though he existed alone, with no other buzzard 
on the earth. 

There was no hurry, no excitement anywhere ; 
even the struggle on the ground was measured 
and entirely wooden. None of the creatures on 
the fence showed any haste to fall to feeding. 
After alighting they would go through the long 
process of folding up their wings and packing 
them against their sides ; then they would sit 
awhile as if trying to remember why they had 
come here rather than gone to any other place. 
Occasionally one would unfold his long wings by 
sections, as you would open a jointed rule, pause 
a moment with them outstretched, and, with a 
few ponderous flaps, sail off into the sky without 
having tasted the banquet. Then another upon 
the ground, having feasted, would run a few 

[329] 



steps to get spring, and bounding heavily into 
the air, would smite the earth with his too long 
wings, and go swinging up above the trees. As 
these grew small and disappeared in the distance, 
others came into view, mere specks among the 
clouds, descending in ever- diminishing circles 
until they settled, without word or greeting, with 
their fellows at the banquet. 

The fence was black with them. Evidently 
there is news that spreads even among these in- 
communicative ghouls. Soon one settled upon 
the fence -stake directly over me. To dive from 
the clouds at the frightful rate of a mile a min- 
ute, and, with those mighty wings, catch the 
body in the invisible net of air about the top of 
a fence-stake, is a feat that stops one's breath to 
see. No matter if, here within my reach, his 
suit of black looked rusty ; no matter if his beak 
was a sickly, milky white, his eyes big and wa- 
tery, and wrinkled about his small head and 
snaky neck was red, bald skin, making a visage 
as ugly as could be made without human assis- 
tance. In spite of all this, I looked upon him 
with wonder ; for I had seen him mark this slen- 
der pole from the clouds, and hurl himself toward 

[330] 



it as though to drive it through him, aud then, 
between these powerful wings, light as softly- 
upon the point as a sleeping babe is laid upon a 
pillow from its mother's arms. 

Perhaps half a hundred now were gathered in 
a writhing heap upon the ground. A banquet 
this sans toasts and cheer— the very soul of the 
unconvivial. It was a strange dumb-show in 
serious reality, rather than a banquet. In the 
stir of their scuffling, the dry clashing of their 
wings, and the noise of their tumbling and pull- 
ing and pecking as they moved together, I could 
hear low, serpent-like hisses. Except for a sort 
of half-heard guttural croak at rare intervals, 
these hisses were the only utterances that broke 
the silence. So far as I know, this sibilant, ba- 
trachio -reptilian language is the meager limit of 
the buzzard's faculty of vocal expression. With 
croak and hiss he warns and woos. And what 
tender emotion has a buzzard too subtle for ex- 
pression by a croak or hiss ? And if he hates, 
what need has he of words— with such a coun- 
tenance ? 

But he does not hate, for he does not love. To 
be able to hate implies a soul ; and the buzzard 

[331] 



has no soul. Laziness, gluttony, uncleanness, 
have destroyed everything spiritual in him. He 
has almost lost his language, so that now, even 
among his own kind, except when surprised, he 
is silent. But he needs no language, for he is not 
companionable ; there is no trace of companion- 
ableness in his nature. He seems entirely de- 
void of affection and fellow-feeling, showing no 
interest whatever in any one or anything save his 
stomach. The seven evil spirits of the dyspeptic 
possess him, body and soul. 

It must be added, however, that the buzzards 
are to some extent gregarious. They often fly 
together, roost together, and nest in communities. 
In this latter fact some naturalists would find 
evidence of sociability ; but this manner of nest- 
ing is not their habit. They more generally 
nest a single pair to a swamp. When they nest 
in communities, it is rather because the locality 
is suitable than from any desire to be together. 
Yet they frequently choose the same dead tree, 
or clump of trees, for a roost, which may mean 
that even in a buzzard's bosom there is something 
that calls for companionship. 

For a nesting-place the buzzard selects a swamp 

[ 332 ] 




I 1 



; A banquet this sans toasts and cheer. 



or remote and heavy timber where there is slight 
chance of molestation. Here, in a rough nest of 
sticks and leaves, upon the ground, in a hollow 
log, upon a stump, or sometimes upon the bare 
earth, are laid the two long, brown-blotched eggs 
that constitute the complement. 

"I once found a nest," a correspondent writes, 
"ina low, thick mat of briers and grape-vines. 
The female was brooding her eggs when I came 
upon the nest, and the moment she caught sight 
of me, instead of trying to defend her treasures 
as any normal mother would have done, she 
turned like a demon upon her nest, thrust her 
beak into one of her eggs, and devoured it before 
I could scare her off." 

This unnatural act is thus far without parallel 
in my observation of bird life. But it is only 
testimony of what one may read in the appear- 
ance of the buzzard. The indolent habits, the 
unnamable tastes, have demoralized and uu- 
mothered the creature. 

I cannot think that the buzzard was so de- 
praved back in the Beautiful Garden. The curse 
of Adam is on him ; but instead of sweating like 
the rest of us and so redeeming himself, he is 

[334] 



content to be cursed. The bird has degenerated. 
You can see in his countenance that originally 
he was not so vicious in taste and habit. If, when 
this office of scavenger was created, the buzzard 
was installed, it was because he was too lazy and 
too indifferent to refuse. He may have protested 
and sulked ; he even continues to protest and 
sulk : but he has been engaged so long in the 
business now that he is utterly incapable of 
earning a living in any other way. 

I saw all this in the face and attitude of the 
buzzard on the stake above me. He sat there as 
if conscious that a scavenger's life was beneath 
a bird of his parts ; he looked mad with himself 
for submitting to a trade so degrading, mad with 
his position among the birds : but long ago he 
recognized the difficulty of changing his place 
and manner of life, and, rather than make the 
effort, he sank into this state of soured silence. 

That this is the way to read his personal rec- 
ord and the history of his clan is clear to my 
mind, because the bird is still armed with the 
great talons and beak of the eagles. He was 
once a hunter. Through generations of disuse 
these weapons have become dulled, weakened, 

[335] 



and unfit for the hunt j and the buzzard, instead 
of struggling for his quarry, is driven to eat a 
dinner that every other predatory bird would 
refuse. 

Another proof of his fall is that at this late day 
he has a decided preference for fresh food. This 
was doubtless the unspoiled taste of his ancestors, 
given with the beak and talons. He is a glutton 
and a coward, else he would be an eagle still. 

We associate the turkey-buzzard with carrion, 
and naturally attribute his marvelous power of 
finding food to his sense of smell. Let a dead 
animal be dragged into the field, and in less than 
an hour there will be scores of these somber crea- 
tures gathered about it, when, in all the reach of 
the horizon for perhaps a week past, not more 
than one or two have been seen at any one time. 
Did they detect an odor miles away and follow 
the scent hither? Possibly. But yonder you 
spy a buzzard sailing so far up that he appears 
no larger than a swallow. He is descending. 
Watch where he settles. Lo ! he is eating the 
garter-snake that you killed in the path a few 
minutes ago. How did the bird from that alti- 
tude discover so tiny a thing % He could not 

[336] 



" Floating without effort among the clouds." 

have smelled it, for it had no odor. He saw it. 
It is not by scent, but by his astonishing powers 
of sight, that the buzzard finds his food. 

One day I carried a freshly killed chicken into 
the field, and tying a long string to it, hid my- 
self near by in a corn-shock. Soon a buzzard 
passing overhead began to circle about me : and 
22 [ 337 ] 



I knew that he had discovered the chicken. 
Down he came, leisurely at first, spirally wind- 
ing, as though descending some aerial stairway 
from the clouds, till, just above the tree-tops, he 
began to swing like a great pendulum through 
the air, turning his head from side to side as he 
passed over the chicken, watching to see if it 
were alive. He was about to settle when I pulled 
the string. Up he darted in great fright. Again 
and again I repeated the experiment ; and each 
time, at the least sign of life, the buzzard hurried 
off — afraid of so inoffensive a thing as a chicken ! 
Quite a different story comes to me from Penn- 
sylvania. My correspondent writes : " Years ago, 
while I was at school in De Kalb, Mississippi, all ' 
the children had their attention called to a great 
commotion in a chicken-yard next the school- 
house. It appeared that a large hawk had settled 
down and was doing battle with a hen. My bro- 
ther left the school-house and ran to the yard, 
cautiously opened the gate, slipped up behind, 
and caught the { hawk '—which proved to be a 
large and almost famished turkey-buzzard. He 
kept it four or five days, when it died." Ex- 
treme hunger might drive a buzzard to at- 

[338] 



tack a hen ; but rare indeed is such boldness 
nowadays. 

There were by this time fully a hundred buz- 
zards about me, some coming, some going, some 
sitting moody and disgusted, while others picked 
hungrily among the bones. They had no suspi- 
cion of my presence, but I had grown tired of 
them, and springing suddenly from the leaves, 
I stood in their midst. There was consternation 
and hissing for an instant, then a violent napping 
of wings, and away they flew in every direction. 
Their heavy bodies were quickly swung above 
the trees, and soon they were all sailing away 
beyond the reach of straining eyes. Presently 
one came over far up in the blue, floating with- 
out effort among the clouds, now wheeling in 
great circles, now swinging through immense 
arcs, sailing with stately grandeur on motionless 
wings in flight that was sublime. 



[339] 



UP HERRING RUN 




UP HEEEIXG RUN 

THE habit of migrating is not confined to 
birds. To some extent it is common to all 
animals that have to move about for food, whe- 
ther they live in the water or upon the land. 
The warm south wind that sweeps northward in 
successive waves of bluebirds and violets, of 
warblers and buttercups, moves with a like magic 
power over the sea. It touches the ocean with 
the same soft hand that wakes the flowers and 
brings the birds, and as these return to upland 
and meadow, the waters stir and the rivers and 
streams become alive with fish. Waves of stur- 
geon, shad, and herring come in from unknown 
regions of the ocean, and pass up toward the 

[343] 



head waters of the rivers and through the 
smaller streams inland to the fresh-water lakes. 

Waves of herring, did I say ? It is a torrent 
of herring that rushes up Herring Run, a spring 
freshet from the loosened sources of the life of 
the sea. 

This movement of the fish is mysterious ; no 
more so than the migration of the birds, per- 
haps, but it seems more wonderful to me. Bobo- 
link's yearly round trip from Cuba to Canada 
may be, and doubtless is, a longer and a more 
perilous journey than that made by the herring 
or by any other migrant of the sea ; but Bobo- 
link's road and his reasons for traveling are not 
altogether hidden. He has the cold winds and 
failing food to drive him, and the older birds to 
pilot him on his first journey South, and the love 
of home to draw him back when the spring 
comes North again. Food and weather were ttie 
first and are still the principal causes of his un- 
rest. The case of the herring seems to be differ- 
ent. Neither food nor weather influences them. 
They come from the deep sea to the shallow 
water of the shore to find lodgment for their eggs 
and protection for their young j but what brings 

[344] 




\ 



From unknown regions of the ocean." 




" A crooked, fretful 
little stream." 



them from the salt into 
fresh water, and what 
drives these particular 
herring up Herring Run 
instead of up some other 
stream? Will some one 
please explain? 

Herring Run is the nat- 
ural outlet of Whitman's 
Pond. It runs down 
through Weymouth about 
three fourths of a mile to 
Weymouth Back River, 
thence to the bay and 
on to the sea. It is a 
crooked, fretful little 
stream, not over twenty 
feet wide at the most, 
very stony and very shal- 
low. 

About a hundred years 
ago, as near as the oldest 
inhabitants can remem- 
ber, a few men of Wey- 
mouth went down to 
Taunton with their ox- 

[346] 



teams, and caught several barrels of herring 
as they came up the Taunton River to spawn. 
These fish they brought alive to Weymouth 
and liberated in Whitman's Pond j and these 
became the ancestors of the herring which have 
been returning to Whitman's Pond for the last 
century of Aprils. 

As soon as the weather warms in the spring 
the herring make their aj)pearance in the Run. 
A south wind along in April is sure to fetch 
them 5 and from the first day of their arrival, 
for about a month, they continue to come, on 
their way to the pond. But they may be delayed 
for weeks by cold or storms. Their sensitiveness 
to changes of temperature is quite as delicate as a 
thermometer's. On a favorable day — clear and 
sunny with a soft south wind— they can be seen 
stemming up-stream by hundreds. Suddenly 
the wind shifts, blowing up cold from the east, 
and long before the nicest instrument registers a 
fraction of change in the temperature of the 
Run, the herring have turned tail to and scur- 
ried off down-stream to the salt water. 

They seem to mind nothing so much as this 
particular change of the wind and the cold that 
follows. It may blow or cloud over, and even 

[347] 



rain, without affecting them, if only the storms 
are from the right quarter and it stays warm. 
A cold east wind always hurries them back to 
deep water, where they remain until the weather 
warms up again. Late in May, however, when 
they must lay their eggs, they ascend the stream, 
and nothing short of a four-foot dam will effec- 
tually stop their progress to the pond. 

They are great swimmers. It is a live fish in- 
deed that makes Whitman's Pond. There are 
flying-fish and climbing-fish, fish that walk over 
land and fish that burrow through the mud ; 
but in an obstacle race, with a swift stream to 
stem, with rocks, logs, shallows, and dams to get 
over, you may look for a winner in the herring. 

He will get up somehow— right side up or 
bottom side up, on his head or on his tail, swim- 
ming, jumping, flopping, climbing, up he comes ! 
A herring can almost walk on his tail. I have 
watched them swim up Herring Eun with their 
backs half out of water ; and when it became too 
shallow to swim at all, they would keel over on 
their sides and flop for yards across stones so 
bare and dry that a mud-minnow might easily 
have drowned upon them for lack of water. 

[348] 



mi 



d 







"Swimming, jumping, flopping, climbing, up he comes!" 



They are strong, graceful, athletic fish, quite 
the ideal fish type, well balanced and bewilder- 
ingly bony. The herring's bones are his Sam- 
son hair — they make his strength and agility 
possible ; and besides that, they are vast protec- 
tion against the frying-pan. 

When the herring are once possessed of the 
notion that it is high time to get back to the 
ancestral pond and there leave their eggs, they 
are completely mastered by it. They are not to 
be stopped nor turned aside. Like Mussulmans 
toward Mecca they struggle on, until an impass- 
able dam intervenes or the pond is reached. 
They seem to feel neither hunger, fear, nor 
fatigue, and, like the salmon of Columbia River, 
often arrive at their spawning-grounds so bat- 
tered and bruised that they die of their wounds. 
They become frantic when opposed. In Herring 
Run I have seen them rush at a dam four feet 
high, over which tons of water were pouring, and, 
by sheer force, rise over two feet in the perpen- 
dicular fall before being carried back. They 
would dart from the foam into the great sheet of 
falling water, strike it like an arrow, rise straight 
up through it, hang an instant in mid-fall, and 

[350] 



be hurled back, and killed often, on the rocks 
beneath. Had there been volume enough of the 
falling water to have allowed them a fair swim- 
ming chance, I believe that they could have 
climbed the dam through the perpendicular 
column. 

Under the dam, and a little to one side, a "rest," 
or pen, has been constructed into which the her- 
ring swim and are caught. The water in this 
pen is backed up by a gate a foot high. The 
whole volume of the stream pours over this gate 
and tears down a two- foot sluiceway with velo- 
city enough to whirl along a ten-pound rock 
that I dropped into the box. The herring run 
this sluice and jump the gate with perfect ease. 
Twelve thousand of them have leaped the gate 
in a single hour ; and sixty thousand of them 
went over it in one day and were scooped from 
the pen. The fish always keep their heads up- 
stream, and will crowd into the pen until the 
shallow water is packed with them. When no 
more can squeeze in, a wire gate is put into the 
sluice, the large gates of the dam are closed, and 
the fish are ladled out with scoop-nets. 

The town sold the right to a manufacturing 

[ 351 ] 



company to build this dam in the Kun, together 
with the sole right to catch the herring, on con- 
dition that yearly a certain number of the fish be 
carted alive to the pond in order to spawn ; and 
with this further condition, that every Wey- 
mouth householder be allowed to buy four hun 
dred herring at twenty-five cents per hundred. 

A century ago four hundred herring to a 
household might not have been many herring j 
but things have changed in a hundred years. 
To-day no householder, saving the keeper of the 
town house, avails himself of this generous offer. 
I believe that a man with four hundred pickled 
herring about his premises to-day would be 
mobbed. Pickled herring, scaly, shrunken, 
wrinkled, discolored, and strung on a stick in 
the woodshed, undoes every other rank and bil- 
ious preserve that I happen to know. One can 
easily credit the saying, still current in the town, 
that if a native once eats a Weymouth herring- 
he will never after leave the place. 

Usually the fish first to arrive in the spring 
are males. These precede the females, or come 
along with them in the early season, while the 
fish to arrive last are nearly all females. The 

[352] 



few that are taken alive to the pond deposit 
their eggs within a few days, and, after a little 
stay, descend the Run, leap the dam, and again 
pass out into the ocean. The eggs are placed 
along the shallow edges of the pond, among the 
reeds and sedges. At first they float around in 
a thin, viscid slime, or jelly, which finally acts as 
a glue to fasten them to the grass. Here, left 
without parental care, the eggs hatch and the 
fry wiggle off and begin at once to shift for 
themselves. 

How hard they fare ! In her sacrifice of young- 
fish, nature seems little better than a bloody 
Aztec. I happened to be at Bay Side, a sturgeon 
fishery on the Delaware Bay, when a sturgeon 
was landed whose roe weighed ninety pounds. I 
took a quarter of an ounce of these eggs, counted 
them, and reckoned that the entire roe numbered 
3,168,000 eggs. Yet, had these eggs been laid, 
not more than one to a million would have de- 
veloped to maturity. So it is with the herring. 
Millions of their eggs are devoured by turtles, 
frogs, pickerel, and eels. Indeed, young herring 
are so important a food-supply for fresh-water 
fish that the damming of streams and the indis- 

23 [353] 



criminate slaughter of the spawners now seri- 
ously threatens certain inland fishing interests. 
Many waters have been re-stocked with herring 
as a source of food for more valuable fish. 

August comes, and the youngsters, now about 
the length of your finger, grown tired of the fresh 
water and the close margins of the pond, find 
their way to the Run, and follow their parents 
down its rough bed to a larger life in the sea. 
Here again hungry enemies await them. In 
untold numbers they fall a prey to sharks, cod, 
and swordfish. Yet immense schools survive, 
and thousands will escape even the fearful steam 
nets of the menhaden-fishermen and see Herring 
Run again. 

If only we could conjure one of them to talk ! 
What a deep-sea story he could tell ! What 
sights, what wanderings, what adventures ! But 
the sea keeps all her tales. We do not know 
even if the herring from Whitman's Pond live 
together as an individual clan or school during 
their ocean life. There are certain indications 
that they do. There is not much about a Whit- 
man's Pond herring to distinguish it from a 
Taunton River or a Mystic Pond herring,— the 

[ 354 ] 



><£• 




'• Here again hungry enemies await them." 

Weymouth people declare they can tell the 
difference with their eyes shut,— though I be- 
lieve the fish themselves know one another, and 
that those of each pond keep together. At least, 
when the inland running begins, the schools are 

[355] 



united, for then no Whitman's Pond herring is 
found with a Taunton River band. 

In late summer the fry go down-stream j but 
whether it is they that return the next spring, 
or whether it is only the older fish, is not certain. 
It is certain that no immature fish ever appear 
in the spring. The naturalists are almost agreed 
that the herring reach maturity in eighteen 
months. In that case it will be two years before 
the young appear in the Run. The Weymouth 
fishermen declare, however, that they do not 
seek the pond until the third spring $ for they 
say that when the pond was first stocked, it was 
three years before any herring, of their own 
accord, made their way back to spawn. 

Meantime where and how do they live ? All 
the ocean is theirs to roam through, though even 
the ocean has its belts and zones, its barriers 
which the strongest swimmers cannot pass. The 
herring are among the nomads of the sea j but 
let them wander never so far through the deep, 
you may go to the Run in April and expect to 
see them. Here, over the stones and shallows 
by which they found their way to the sea, they 
will come struggling back. No mistake is ever 

[356] 



made, no variation, no question as to the path. 
On their way lip the river from the bay they 
will pass other fresh- water streams, as large, even 
larger, than Herring Enn. Bnt their instinct is 
trne. They never tnrn aside until they taste 
the Eun, and though myriads enter, a half-mile 
farther up the river not a herring will be found. 
It is easy to see how the ox might know his 
owner, and the ass his master's crib ; but how a 
herring, after a year of roving through the sea, 
knows its way up Herring Eun to the pond, is 
past finding out. 




[357] 






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